Full video: President Obama's immigration town hall
The Rundown with Jose Diaz-Balart 2/25/15
Watch the full video of President Barack Obama’s town hall on immigration reform, hosted by msnbc’s Jose Diaz-Balart.
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Remarks by the President in Immigration Town Hall -- Miami, FL
Florida International University Miami, Florida February 25, 2015 4:00 P.M. EST
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. (Applause.)
It's good to see you, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: It's good to be with you, José.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Thanks for being here at FIU. Really appreciate you being here with us.
THE PRESIDENT: It is wonderful to be with the Golden Panthers. (Applause.)
MR. DIAZ-BALART: There you go!
Mr. President, let’s begin. It's going to be bilingual at times, but you and I are used to that.
THE PRESIDENT: I can handle that.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Senator McConnell, on Tuesday, made an offer to break the Department of Homeland Security impasse. He wants to vote to fund DHS through September and then separately vote to strip funding for your executive actions on immigration. As you know, it seems as if the Democrats are onboard in the Senate. We're 48 hours from the deadline. Republicans have a plan. Democrats seem to be onboard. You're waiting on a judge. Is that enough?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, José, let me start by just talking generally about why immigration is so important and why we've got to fix a broken system.
We've had a system for a very long time that nobody is happy with. We know that businesses are being deprived of outstanding workers. We know that our agricultural sector that's so dependent on immigrants is hurting because of uncertainty. We know that we should be deploying our resources and focusing it more on dealing with felons and national security issues with respect to our borders, and not focusing on the mom who’s working someplace, looking after her kids and doing the right thing.
And for over six years, now, I've been calling on the Republicans to work with us to pass a comprehensive fix that would strengthen our borders, that would make sure that businesses have the workforce that they needed, aboveboard, not paying them under the table, not depriving them of things like overtime or workers’ rights, and that we provided a pathway for people to earn their way into a legal status and ultimately citizenship.
And to their credit, members of the Senate passed a bipartisan bill, overwhelmingly. But the House Republicans blocked it. They refused to even allow it to get on the floor for a vote. What I did, then, was to say I'm going to use all of the authority that I have as the chief executive of the United States, as well as Commander-in-Chief, to try to make sure that we are prioritizing our immigration system a lot smarter than we've been doing. And what that means is, is that instead of focusing on families, we're going to focus on felons. We're going to strengthen our borders, which is what people are concerned about.
We're going to build on what we did in 2012 with DACA, which allowed young people who had come here and were Americans in all respects except they didn’t have the proper papers to get legal so that they could continue in their higher education, they’re serving in the military --
MR. DIAZ-BALART: They know no other country.
THE PRESIDENT: They know no other country. And this approach of executive actions has been used by previous Republican and Democratic Presidents throughout modern times.
Now, what we did most recently was to expand that so more people would qualify for DACA, and we also said if you are the parent of a U.S. citizen or a legal resident, if you’ve been here for a while, if you're part of our community, then you should be able to come forward, get registered, go through a background check, and if you generally have been contributing to our community, you should be able to stay here legally and not be in fear of deportation.
It did not provide citizenship because only Congress can do that, but it was going to help. And I think we saw the reaction in the community and, the truth is, across the country, people recognized this was the right thing and the smart thing to do.
Now, unfortunately, a number of Republican governors chose to sue. They found a district court judge who has enjoined -- meaning stopped -- us going forward with this program. But that’s just the first part of the process. This is just one federal judge. We have appealed it very aggressively. We’re going to be as aggressive as we can because not only do we know that the law is on our side, but history is also on our side.
And in the meantime, what we said to Republicans is, instead of trying to hold hostage funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is so important for our national security, fund that, and let’s get on with actually passing comprehensive immigration reform.
So in the short term, if Mr. McConnell, the leader of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, want to have a vote on whether what I’m doing is legal or not, they can have that vote. I will veto that vote, because I’m absolutely confident that what we’re doing is the right thing to do. (Applause.) And in the meantime, we’re going to continue to pursue all legal avenues to make sure that we have a country in which we are respecting not only the law, because we’re a nation of laws, but we’re also respecting the fact that we’re a nation of immigrants.
And I’m confident that, ultimately, people who have been living here for a long time, who have roots here, oftentimes have U.S. citizen children here or legal resident children here, that they deserve to have an opportunity. And that’s what we want to provide them.
Q (As interpreted.) Mr. President, independently of what can happen with all the appeals and judges, it would take months. Mr. President, we’re facing very real consequences and our community is in fear -- has fear that’s due to your actions, because that fear is that uncertainty. Millions of people are in the balance here against a rock and a hard place. What is the responsibility you feel regarding this uncertainty, this pain that a lot of the community, the Hispanic community are feeling?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, one of the most important things that I think everybody needs to know -- and this didn’t get enough attention when I made my announcement last year -- in addition to expanding DACA, in addition to creating the DAPA program for the parents of DREAMers, what we also did was we said we’re going to change how ICE and our Border Patrol system operates. Because we recognize we’re not going to deport 11 million people. And so why we would want to allocate resources in a wasteful way -- that doesn’t make sense.
What we said was let’s prioritize who it is that we’re really focused on. We’re focused on criminals and gang members who are a threat to our community. And we’re focused on the border and making sure the people who’ve just come, that we are making sure that they are in a position where they understand that they’ve got to come through legal pathways. But for people who’ve been living here for a long time, they are no longer prioritized for enforcement and deportation.
And so, even as people should be preparing their paperwork so that when the time comes that they can apply, in the meantime, understand that ICE and the border security mechanisms that we have in place, they are instructed to focus on criminals and people who have just crossed the border. If you’ve been here for a long time and if you qualify, generally, then during this period, even with legal uncertainty, they should be in a good place.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: And the problem is, Mr. President, that that may be the fact, but where the rubber meets the road, that’s not happening many times. Many times, people are being deported that have been here, that have kids, that have a process to even become legal, and they’re being deported. So one thing is what you’re saying; another thing, a lot of times, is what happens where the rubber meets the road.
THE PRESIDENT: I think what you’re going to be finding, José, is that every time that you have a big bureaucracy and you’ve changed policy, there’s going to be one or two, three instances where people apparently haven’t gotten the message. But if you talk to the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, he is absolutely committed to this new prioritization. More importantly, I, the President of the United States, am absolutely committed to this new prioritization.
And so families out there need to understand that we are going to be focusing on criminals. We’re going to be focusing on potential felons. We are reorganizing how we work with state and local governments to make sure that we are not prioritizing families. And you are going to see I think a substantial change, even as the case works its way through the courts.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Mr. President, I want to go to the audience. Eric is a war veteran. He was wounded in Afghanistan. He is with us this afternoon.
Eric.
Q Good afternoon, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: Hey, Eric.
Q First and foremost, I want to thank you for coming here. There’s so many things going on in the world right now, and I just want to thank you for taking your time to come and talk to us, because I know you have to deal with so many things. I can only imagine what you have to deal with every day.
But a little bit about myself. When I was 17, I joined the U.S. Army. Actually, my mom had to sign because I was so young. My 18th birthday I spent in basic training, and my 21st birthday was spent in Afghanistan, and I was actually shot at on my birthday. I came back. I’m a wounded warrior. I was medically discharged from the military in 2011. And I come back home, and only to find out that I’m fighting another war with my mother -- trying to keep her here.
So I just want to ask you, Mr. President, there has to be some kind of gray area for a situation like this. Because I put in a lot of time and I love this country, and I just feel like if it wasn’t for her signing those papers I would never have been able to join this great American army. So I want to ask you if there’s any way that situation could be handled a little better.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, let me just say thank you for your incredible service to our country. (Applause.) You’re a great example of why this issue is so important. Our country is strong because of generation after generation of immigrants who embraced the ideals of America and then fought for those ideals, and fought in wars to defend our country, and built companies that employed people, and helped to build the railroads and the highways. And all the things that we take for granted in this country, those were built by immigrants. We’re all immigrants. That’s who we are. Unless you’re one of the first Americans -- Native Americans. And so we have to recognize that.
And I’m confident that your mother qualifies under the executive action program that I’ve put forward. Right now, the judge has blocked us initiating the program where she can come and sign up and get registered. But in the meantime, part of the message that I’m sending is, if you qualified for the executive action that I put forward, then we’re still going to make sure that your mom is not prioritized in terms of enforcement. And she should feel confident about that. So I just want to assure her, short term.
Long term, we need a situation where she has a pathway to become a legal citizen. And that’s why we still have to make sure that we get a bill passed through Congress, and we have to keep the pressure on those who are blocking that bill.
One last point that I think is important. The judge in this case did not reverse DACA that I put forward in 2012. So hundreds of thousands of young people all across the country who’ve signed up, registered, and are going to school, making something of their lives -- you have to understand that hasn’t been affected whatsoever.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Expand on that a little bit, because it’s important.
THE PRESIDENT: It’s important that in 2012, when I made my first announcement about executive actions, that applied to the DREAMers. Basically, if you were -- if you had come here before 2007, you’re between the ages of 16 and 30, you could register, sign up, you now had a legal status. It was temporary because we hadn’t passed a bill yet, but it meant that you could get a work permit, you could go to school -- you could do the things that American kids do as they’re entering into adulthood.
That has not changed. And so those who’ve already signed up, you need to understand that has not been challenged in court. And what’s also important is we still have several hundred thousand young people who qualify for that original executive action back in 2012 who have not yet taken advantage of it. And now is the time for all of you to take advantage of it.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Eric, thank you for that question. (Applause.)
And, Mr. President, we’ve been just flooded with questions using our social media hashtags, and this one comes from #ObamaResponde. It says: How do you guarantee that an immigrant who is in the middle of legalizing his status that eh or she is not going to be deported by ICE? Mr. President, my husband was deported during the process, and this, she says, happened just last week.
THE PRESIDENT: I would have to know the details of what exactly happened. But what I can tell you is that until we pass a law through Congress, the executive actions that we’ve taken are not going to be permanent; they’re temporary.
We are now implementing a new prioritization. There are going to be some jurisdictions, and there may be individual ICE officials or Border Patrol who aren’t paying attention to our new directives. But they’re going to be answerable to the head of the Department of Homeland Security, because he’s been very clear about what our priorities should be. And I’ve been very clear about what our priorities should be.
And I don’t know what the particular circumstances here are, but what I can tell you is people who have signed up, for example, under my executive action in DACA -- there are 700,000, 800,000 people who signed up -- they haven’t had problems. It’s worked. So we know how to make this work.
Right now we’ve got to judge who’s blocking it from working.
And in the interim, until we can actually process all these applications, then what we’re going to do is do what we can in terms of making sure that we’re prioritizing it properly. But the challenge is still going to be that not only do we have to win this legal fight, which we are appealing very aggressively, but ultimately we’re still going to have to pass a law through Congress.
The bottom line is, José, that I’m using all of the legal power vested in me in order to solve this problem. And one of the things about living in a democracy is that we have separation of powers -- we have Congress, we have the judicial branch -- and right now, we’ve got some disagreements with some members of Congress and some members of the judiciary in terms of what should be done.
But what I’m confident about is, ultimately, this is going to get done. And the reason it’s going to get done is it’s the right thing to do and it is who we are as a people. (Applause.)
MR. DIAZ-BALART: But what are the consequences? Because how do you ensure that ICE agents or Border Patrol won’t be deporting people like this? I mean, what are the consequences?
THE PRESIDENT: José, look, the bottom line is, is that if somebody is working for ICE and there is a policy and they don’t follow the policy, there are going to be consequences to it. So I can’t speak to a specific problem. What I can talk about is what’s true in the government, generally.
In the U.S. military, when you get an order, you’re expected to follow it. It doesn’t mean that everybody follows the order. If they don’t, they’ve got a problem. And the same is going to be true with respect to the policies that we’re putting forward.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Mr. President, people in your own administration, legal experts, predicted for weeks really that the Texas judge could probably rule against you. And this could happen again. I mean, you just mentioned there are more than 25 people who have joined in states, who have joined in this legal process. Any and all of these other cases or judges could also act the same way that this judge in Texas did. So what was the contingency plan? I mean, did you have a contingency plan? Specifically, what are you going to do going forward as this process continues?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, José, we’ve got one judge who made this decision. We appeal it to a higher court. We believe that the law is clearly on our side. This is true in everything that we do.
Look at the Affordable Care Act. We’ve signed up 11 million people to get coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Over 2.5 million of them are Latino. (Applause.) Because of what we’ve done, we’ve seen the percentage of uninsured Latinos drop by almost 7 percent. It’s unprecedented. So we know it can work.
Now, that hasn’t stopped the Republican Party from suing us constantly, to try to find a judge who may think that what we’re doing is in appropriate, despite the fact that it passed through Congress. We’ve got a Supreme Court that is still ruling on these cases. But that hasn’t stopped us from moving forward.
And that’s been true historically on every movement of social progress. It’s not always a straight line. Sometimes we’re going to get legal challenges, but as long as we’re confident -- and I am very confident in this circumstance that this is within my power -- that ultimately then it’s going to get done.
But the one thing I do want to emphasize is that in order for us to get absolute certainty that it’s going to be permanent and not just temporary, that it doesn’t just last during my administration and then get reversed by the next President, is we’ve got to pass a bill -- which means the pressure has to continue to stay on Congress. (Applause.) The pressure has to continue to stay on the Republican Party that is currently blocking the passage of comprehensive immigration reform.
It means that for the next set of presidential candidates -- because I’m term-limited; Michelle is happy about that -- (laughter) -- when they start asking for votes, the first question should be, do you really intend to deport 11 million people? And if not, what is your plan to make sure that they have the ability to have a legal status, stay with their families, and ultimately contribute to the United States of America?
So we’re going to have to keep on with the political process on a separate track. But in the meantime, we’re going to do everything that we can to make sure that we implement executive actions as we’ve discussed.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: How long will it take? Because a lot of people are asking. They said, we were 24 hours away from registering for the expanded DACA and just months from DAPA. This happens 12 hours before. What’s going to happen now? How long is it going to take? And, again, a lot of the questions are, was the President caught by surprise? And why is it taking so long? This is what we’re getting, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: What I’m saying is, is that of course we weren’t surprised. I’ve got a bunch of lawyers, we saw the judge who was rendering the opinion. The fact that we weren’t surprised doesn’t mean we can stop the judge from rendering an opinion. It means that we then go forward in the appeal process. That’s how the legal system works.
And we have asked –- first and foremost, we have asked for a stay. What a stay means, by the way, for the non-lawyers, is simply that whatever the judge thinks, it shouldn’t stop us from going ahead and implementing. The first step is to go before that same judge and say, judge, what you said is wrong, rethink it. He may not agree with that.
The next step is to go to a higher court, the Fifth Circuit. That will take a couple of months for us to file that and argue that before the Fifth Circuit. We expect to win in the Fifth Circuit, and if we don’t, then we’ll take it up from there.
So at each stage, we are confident that we’ve got the better argument. As I said before, what I’ve done is no different than what previous Presidents have done. In the meantime, what I can do is make sure –-
MR. DIAZ-BALART: The numbers are unprecedented.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, the numbers are unprecedented only relatively speaking. I mean, if you look at what George H.W. Bush did, he, proportionally to what was then the immigrant population, was very aggressive in expanding. The difference is, is that Democrats didn’t challenge what he did for largely political reasons.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: And there was a bill already underway.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, there was a bill underway, but in some ways, you could make an argument that since a bill had passed that didn’t solve that problem, Congress had been very direct in saying we don’t want to solve that problem. And he went ahead and did it anyway, because it’s in his authority to implement, using prosecutorial discretion, the limited resources of Department of Homeland Security.
So we’re going to be in a position I think of going through the legal process over the next several months. In the meantime, what people who would qualify for executive action should be doing is gathering up your papers, making sure that you can show that you are a longstanding resident in the United States. You should be making sure that you’ve got the documents so that when we have cleared out all the legal problems and the application process is ready to go, that you’re ready to go.
And we’ve got wonderful advocates who are working with us all across the country, in communities, the churches, civil groups and organizations, civil rights groups, lawyers, advocates. So the community right now, what they can do is prepare so that as soon as the legal process has worked themselves through, we can go forward.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Mr. President, I want to introduce you to Boris Gills (ph). He is a student here at Florida International University. Born in Haiti.
Good afternoon.
Q Hello, Mr. President. My name is Boris Gills(ph), and I’m an international student. I came from Haiti. And I’m a survivor of the earthquake that badly ravaged my country in 2010. In 2011, I came here in the U.S. on a student visa. Now, I’m a senior at FIU. I’m graduating next semester with a double major in finance and international business. Like so many of us international students, we don’t know what to do. Our back against the wall. We’re doing everything by the book, but yet it feels like we’re left out of every single reference, of everything going on. So now my question is, what is it that you can do to help us international students? How can you include us in your executive orders, maybe? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me just say this. It’s wonderful to see people, young people, talented, from all across the globe coming to stay in the United States. And I want to congratulate Florida International for the diversity of its class and the great work that it’s doing. And we would love more really well-educated, ambitious young people to want to stay here and contribute to this country.
If you look at the history of the founders of Intel and Google and so many of our iconic companies, people like Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, they were immigrants. And one of the mistakes that we’re making right now is we’re training a lot of incredibly talented young people, they’re going to our universities, getting advanced degrees, and then we’re sending them back right away, even though they may want to stay and start businesses here and contribute to our community.
So one of the things that we talked about in the comprehensive immigration bill was how can we provide greater incentives and opportunities for young people with great talent and higher degrees to be able to stay here -- particularly in areas like math and science and technology, where we know that right now we don’t have enough engineers, we don’t have enough computer scientists.
But that is not something that we can do aggressively through executive actions. That’s something that’s going to require legislation for us to do. And, frankly, there’s going to be a -– I want to be very clear, there are a lot of foreign students who come here to study. The fact that they come here to study doesn’t automatically qualify them for legal residence or U.S. citizenship. And I don’t foresee a circumstance where suddenly anybody who is going to college here automatically is qualified for legal residence. There will be criteria in terms of who it is that is able to apply, get legal residence, get a work permit, and maybe ultimately go through citizenship. But that’s going to be through a legal process of legal immigration. That’s not going to be one that is resolved with respect to somebody who has been undocumented. Those are two different circumstances.
And part of what we can do through the comprehensive immigration bill is speed up our legal immigration system. A lot of people end up being forced through the undocumented pool because the legal process is so bogged down, so bureaucratic, so slow, oftentimes the allocations of quotas from different countries don’t reflect the modern world. And so one of the things that the Senate bill originally did was really change that in a smart way and it would have speeded things up. That’s why we still have to get this bill passed and we’re still going to have to put pressure on it.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: On a bigger question that kind of Boris brings up, to extrapolate his case, is some people wonder, well, are you focusing mostly on the undocumented population? And through executive orders, could you not also include those that are here, that are participating already? Folks that came from Haiti, this horrible earthquake that hit five years, are you focused at all on that? I think Boris’s question is, can’t you include them as well to streamline in some way? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Here’s the thing. I was always very clear about this, even when I made the first announcement about the executive actions. The reason I’m confident about our legal position in what we did with DACA, which was already in place since 2012, what we’re now proposing in terms of expanding DACA, and also for the parents of those who qualified for DACA -- the reason I’m confident is that we could take those steps under my powers of prosecutorial discretion.
If, in fact, we were completely just rewriting the immigration laws, then actually the other side would have a case, because we can’t violate statutes. We can’t violate laws that are already in place. What we can do is make choices to implement those laws. That’s what we’ve done with DACA and that’s what we’ve proposed with the expansion of DACA and DAPA.
In order for us to do most of the work that Boris refers to in terms of expanding opportunities, for example, to say to any young person who has got an advanced degree in math and science and engineering, which we know we’re going to need, even as we try to get more and more young Americans to go into those fields –- in order for us to do that, we’re going to need a congressional law to be passed. I don’t have all the authorities that are necessary in order to get some of those things done.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Mr. President, I can’t tell you the amount of questions that we’ve received, both on Telemundo and MSNBC, has really been extraordinary. And one I get a lot, over and over and over again, is a question, Mr. President, when you had absolute control of Congress, you really didn’t fight for immigration. And then when you had the situation where you lost majorities, then you take action. Is there political implications behind something that affects so many people so close to their hearts?
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know if anybody remembers, José, that when I took office and I had a majority, we had the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. (Applause.) The global economy was collapsing. The unemployment rate in the Latino community and the immigrant community had soared. People were losing homes and entire communities were being devastated. So it wasn’t as if I was just sitting back, not doing anything.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: No one says you were sitting back not doing anything --but you did do the ACA, for example.
THE PRESIDENT: We were moving very aggressively on a whole host of issues. And we moved as fast as we could and we wanted immigration done. We pushed for immigration to be done. But, ultimately, we could not get the votes to get it all done.
Now, this is one of the challenges of being President, is there are crying needs everywhere. Even within the Latino communities, even within the immigrant communities, there are crying needs. I don’t regret having done the ACA. I just described for you there are millions of people who are not going to go bankrupt because they got sick because we got that done. So if the question is, would I have loved to have gotten everything done in the first two years -- absolutely, because then, for the next six, I could have relaxed. (Laughter.)
But what we do is we choose to push as hard as we can on all fronts. Some things are politically easier. Some things are politically more difficult. Some things we’re able to get done given the schedule in the Senate or in the House.
One of the biggest challenges that we had on a lot of these issues was what’s called the filibuster in the Senate. Even when we had a majority in the Senate, in order to get things passed, we had to get some Republican votes. And if it were not for that filibuster process where -- by the way, it’s not in the Constitution, but the habits in the Senate have gotten so bad where you’ve got to get 60 votes for everything. As a consequence of that, things like immigration reform, that if I had just needed a simple majority of Democrats we could have gotten done, we could not get done in those circumstances.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: And here’s another social media question. Benson Owen from Houston says: Why did Democrats and the GOP play political Ping Pong with immigration when millions of American families suffer as a result? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: José, wait, wait, wait. I appreciate the applause. Let me just say, that’s just not true -- the notion that Democrats and Republicans played political Ping Pong. (Applause.)
Democrats have consistently stood on the side of comprehensive immigration reform. (Applause.) Democrats have provided strong majorities across the board for comprehensive immigration reform. And you do a disservice when you suggest that, ah, nobody was focused on this, because then you don’t know who’s fighting for you and who’s fighting against you.
And the fact of the matter is that the Democratic Party consistently has, in its platforms, in its conventions, has taken a strong stand that we need to fix a broken immigration system. And the blockage has been very specific on one side.
Now, to their credit, there are Republicans, a handful, who have agreed with us. That’s how we got it passed through the Senate. But let’s not be confused about why we don’t have comprehensive immigration reform right now. It’s very simple: The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, refused to call the bill. Had he called the bill, the overwhelming majority of Democrats and a handful of Republicans would have provided a majority in order to get that done. (Applause.)
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Mr. President, I want to kind of -- as I look out to the many folks that are here, there are so many DREAMers here. Astrid Silva is here. She has a family member in the process of deportation. You actually highlighted her case when you mentioned your executive action. Erika Andiola is here, and she has a question that many DREAMers have, as well.
Q Hi, Mr. President. I’m a DREAMer from Arizona, the state where Sheriff Arpaio and ICE usually criminalize our communities. And my sister is here who actually qualifies for DACA extended, or would have qualified if it was implemented. And my mom is also here. She was, unfortunately, left out of your executive actions and she doesn’t have any citizen children; she only has DREAMers as children. And she is also in deportation proceedings. And because of a previous deportation that she did have and came back for us, she’s actually a priority in your deportation directive.
And so my question to you is, what’s going to happen to my family? Given the fact that immigration reform, it’s not going to happen any time soon, and we know that because of the politics in Congress -- what’s going to happen in the meantime with my mom and my family if immigration comes to my house once again?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me just say, I don’t know, obviously, the details of every specific case, and I’m happy to have somebody look at the case that you just referred to and what’s going on with your mom and your sister. What we’ve done is we’ve expanded my authorities under executive action and prosecutorial discretion as far as we can legally under the existing statute, the existing law. And so now the question is, how can we get a law passed.
Now, that’s heartbreaking, because it means that not everybody is immediately helped. But the fact of the matter is that until that law is changed, what we have to do is to prioritize under the existing law. And what we then have to do is try to get this legal case resolved.
But, look, this is something that I wrestle with every single day, and that is that there are laws on the books that I think are counterproductive. I think there are laws on the books that I don’t think are right in terms of making sure that America is strong. But I have to deal with a Congress that -- a big part of which disagrees with me. I’ve got to deal with judges who may not have been appointed by me and have a different reading of the law. And so what we have to do is just keep on working.
But the one thing that I have to just say to everybody here -- every major social movement, every bit of progress in this country -- whether it’s been the Workers’ Rights Movement, or the Civil Rights Movement, or the Women’s Rights Movement -- every single bit of that progress has required us to fight and to push. And you make progress, and then you don’t get everything right away, and then you push some more. And that’s how the country continually gets better. Precisely because the stories of people like you -- that, then, hopefully, softens the hearts of people who right now are blocking us from solving some of these problems.
And that is going to be something that we just have to continue to work on. That’s the nature of it.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: (As interpreted.) Mr. President, a lot of people ask themselves -- and this is Astrid’s case, and Erika’s as well -- a lot of DREAMers think the same way -- if you have executive actions and judges have to determine at the end if they are legal or not, how come you don’t include the parents, the parents of the DREAMers? If the judge says, well, that’s not legal, I find it not constitutional, so then you deal with it. But please include them.
THE PRESIDENT: Because the theory of prosecutorial discretion is that you have limited resources, and because of that, you can’t apply the law of enforcement to everybody. But if I include everybody, then it’s no longer prosecutorial discretion, then I’m just ignoring the law. And as I said before, then there really would be a strong basis to overturn everything that we've done.
So that’s why, ultimately, the law itself is going to have to be changed. In the meantime, what we have to do is make sure that we're continually fighting to uphold what we've already done. I mean, we've got 800,000 people who are currently taking advantage of DACA, including the young woman who just spoke, from what I understand. And now we've got to get more. But ultimately, in order to make sure that we don't have any heartbreaking stories with respect to immigration, then we have to fix the law.
There are only so many shortcuts. Ultimately, we have to change the law. And people have to remain focused on that. And the way that happens is, by the way, by voting. (Applause.) I mean, I just have to say, in the last election -- and I want to speak particularly the young people here -- in the last election, a little over one-third of eligible voters voted. One-third!
Two-thirds of the people who have the right to vote -- because of the struggles of previous generations, had the right to vote -- stayed home. I'm willing to bet that there are young people who have family members who are at risk of the existing immigration system who still didn’t vote.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Mixed-status families. There are millions of them.
THE PRESIDENT: Who still did not vote. And so my question, I think, to everybody -- not just to the immigrant community, but the country as a whole -- why are you staying at home? (Applause.) Why are you not participating? There are war-torn countries, people full of poverty, who still voted, 60, 70 percent. If here in the United States of America, we voted at 60 percent, 70 percent, it would transform our politics. Our Congress would be completely different. We would have already passed comprehensive immigration reform. (Applause.) It would have already been done.
So I, as President, have the responsibility to set out a vision in terms of where we need to go. I have the responsibility to execute the laws faithfully, and that includes making sure that what’s within my power I am doing everything I can to make the immigration system smarter. But everybody here and everybody watching also has responsibilities. And one of those responsibilities is voting for people who advocate on behalf of the things that you care about.
And staying home is not an option. And being cynical is not an option. And just waiting for somebody else -- whether it's the President, or Congress, or somebody -- José -- to get it done, that's not enough.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: (As interpreted.) What happens, Mr. President, is some people see what’s going on in Washington and they see that one party says something and the other party says something else, and they don't do what they say that they’re going to be doing. Why am I -- this is just a game.
THE PRESIDENT: It’s not a game. Wait, wait, wait --
MR. DIAZ-BALART: And that happens while people are being deported. Every day. More than 2 million people.
THE PRESIDENT: Let me tell you something. This is not a game.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: No, I agree with you. But I'm telling you why people feel cynical.
THE PRESIDENT: They shouldn’t feel that way, because all kinds of changes happen when people vote. There are people who have health insurance right now because somebody went out there and voted. There are people right now who had their homes saved -- otherwise they would have lost them -- because people voted. There are people right now who are going to college because we were able to expand student aid and Pell Grant programs. That happened because people voted. All kinds of changes have taken place over the last six years that have made this country better because people voted.
Now, the fact that we didn’t get 100 percent of what we want -- you never get 100 percent of what you want. You have to go out there and fight for the rest. (Applause.)
And we've made enormous progress, but we have more to do. And that's what I intend on doing in the remaining two years that I’ve got as President. (Applause.)
MR. DIAZ-BALART: (As interpreted.) I am very happy that we are discussing this political topic, Mr. President, because one of the main contenders for the 2016 elections is a former governor from this particular state, Jeb Bush. He said last week that you overstepped your authority, and as a consequence you hurt the effort to find a solution to the immigration problem, and all the affected families deserve something better.
No matter who wins the White House after the next elections in 2016, what’s your main concern? Knowing that you won’t be able to fix before you leave in regards to immigration, when you leave office, what would be the message for the next President that will be living in the White House after the 2016 elections?
(In English.) I can do this in English now.
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no, I got the translation. (Laughter.)
MR. DIAZ-BALART: We’re bilingual here. I’m bilingual.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me make a couple of points. Number one, I haven't given up on passing it while I’m President. (Applause.) We’re going to keep on pushing. And although, so far, the Republican Party has been pretty stubborn about this issue, if they start feeling enough pressure, that can make a difference. And so we just have to keep the pressure. Don’t suddenly just let up, say, well, we just got to wait for the next two years, or we got to wait for a judge. We got to keep on putting pressure on members of Congress -- Republican and Democrat.
If there are Democrats out there who aren’t on board on comprehensive immigration reform -- although the vast majority of Democrats are on board -- but if there are some who aren’t, go talk to them. Push them. I’m not going to just stand still over the next two years. We’re going to keep on trying to get something done. So that’s point number one.
Point number two: I appreciate Mr. Bush being concerned about immigration reform. I would suggest that what he do is talk to the Speaker of the House and the members of his party. (Applause.) Because the fact of the matter is that even after we passed bipartisan legislation in the Senate, I gave the Republicans a year and a half -- a year and a half -- to just call the bill. We had the votes. They wouldn’t do it. And then the notion that, well, if you just hadn’t taken these executive actions, if you hadn’t done DACA, maybe we would have voted for it -- well, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s an excuse.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Yeah, but they’re saying --
THE PRESIDENT: That’s an excuse. (Applause.) Now, let me get to the broader question that you asked, which is, what would I ask for the next President of the United States. One of the things I’ve learned in this position is that as the only office in which you’re the President of all the people, not just some, you have to be thinking not just in terms of short-term politics, you have to be thinking about what’s good for the country over the long term.
Now, over the long term, this is going to get solved, because at some point there’s going to be a President Rodriguez, or there’s going to be a President Chin, or there’s going to be a -- (applause) -- the country is a nation of immigrants, and ultimately, it will reflect who we are, and its politics will reflect who we are. And that’s not something to be afraid of. That’s something to welcome. Because that’s always been how we stay dynamic and stay cutting-edge, and have energy and we’re youthful.
So what I would say to the next President is: Think ahead. Don’t say something short term because you think it’s politically convenient, and then box yourself in where you can’t do what’s right for the country. Think long term.
And what we know is, long term, if you pass a broad-based, thoughtful, comprehensive immigration reform that makes the legal system smoother, that invites talented young people to stay here and work and invest and start businesses; if we provide a pathway to citizenship for those who have been here a long time; if we strengthen our borders; if we make sure that we’re saying to companies, don’t take advantage of undocumented workers by not paying them overtime, not paying them minimum wage -- if we do all those things, we know the deficit will go down, economic growth will go up. We know that we can then really concentrate our resources effectively on our national security.
Every economist who’s looked at this says it’s the right thing to do. The vast majority of businesses recognize it’s the right thing to do. So think ahead. That’s what I’d say to the next President of the United States.
And if you hear people during the course of the future campaigns, over the next several months and into next year, if all they’re doing is demagoging -- if all they’re saying is, “we have to do something about these illegal immigrants,” but then when you ask them, okay, what is it that you want to do, then they don’t have a good answer, or they pretend that we’re going to somehow deport 11 million people, even though everybody knows that the economies of Miami, New York, Chicago, the entire Central Valley in California would collapse -- (applause) -- so they’re not being serious about it -- if you hear people not being serious and not being honest about these issues, then you got to call them on it.
But they’ll ignore you if they don’t think you’re voting.
And so it doesn’t do any good to push candidates but not then back it up with action. And the action, ultimately, is going to be getting engaged and involved in the political process. The people who are least likely to vote are young people. So, young people, you need to think ahead, too. (Applause.) When we work on these issues, most of us -- I’m going to include José in the category of being old.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: We're the same age --
THE PRESIDENT: He looks a little better because I don’t dye my hair. (Laughter and applause.)
MR. DIAZ-BALART: I know. It’s called the “Obama.”
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, man, that’s not true. (Laughter.)
But the fact is, is that we’re going to be okay. The question is what’s happening for the next generation. You have to vote. You have to get involved now. Even if everything seems like it’s okay for you now, you got to be thinking about the future.
And that’s part of what has always been the great strength of America -- we dream about the future. That’s what brings immigrants here, is we’re future-oriented, we’re not past-oriented. The people who are interested in looking backwards, they stay where they are. They’re comfortable. They don’t want change. Even if there’s an earthquake in Haiti, they still stay where they are. Even if there’s poverty where they live, they stay where they are. Even if their religious faith is being discriminated again, they stay where they are.
But if you come to America, it’s because you believe in the future, and that has to be reflected in our politics.
MR. DIAZ-BALART: Señor Presidente, gracias.
THE PRESIDENT: Muchas gracias. (Applause.) Thank you.
Mass deaths after Europeans reached the Americas may have allowed forests to regrow, reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and kicking off a proposed new Anthropocene geologic epoch. Courtesy of NASA
A new proposal pegs the start of the Anthropocene to the Little Ice Age and the Columbian Exchange
"Placing the Anthropocene at this time highlights the idea that colonialism, global trade and the desire for wealth and profits began driving Earth towards a new state," argues ecologist Simon Lewis of Leeds University and the University College of London. "We are a geological force of nature, but that power is unlike any other force of nature in that it is reflexive, and can be used, withdrawn or modified."
The Anthropocene is not a new idea. As far back as the 18th century, the first scientific attempt to lay out a chronology of Earth's geologic history ended with a human epoch. By the 19th century, the idea was commonplace, appearing as the Anthropozoic ("human life rocks") or the "Era of Man" in geology textbooks. But by the middle of the 20th century, the idea of the Holocene—a word which means "entirely recent" in Greek and designates the most recent period in which the great glacial ice sheets receded—had come to dominate, and incorporated the idea of humans as an important element of the current epoch but not the defining one.
That idea is no longer sufficient, according to scientists ranging from geologists to climatologists. Human impacts have simply grown too large, whether it's the flood of nitrogen [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fixing-the-global-nitrogen-problem/ ] released into the world by the invention of the so-called Haber-Bosch process for wresting the vital nutrient from the air or the fact that civilization now moves more earth and stone than all the world's rivers put together.
Researchers have advanced an array of proposals for when this putative new epoch might have begun. Some link it to the start of the mass extinction of large mammals [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hunters-killed-off-big-animals-australia/ ] such as woolly mammoths and giant kangaroos some 50,000 years ago or the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. Others say the Anthropocene is more recent, tied to the beginning of the uptick of atmospheric CO2 concentrations after the invention of an effective coal-burning steam engine.
The most prominent current proposal connects the dawn of the Anthropocene [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-blasts-may-prove-best-marker-of-humanity-s-geologic-record-in-photos/ ] to that of the nuclear age—long-lived radionuclides leave a long-lived record in the rock. The boom in human population and consumption of everything from copper to corn after 1950 or so, known as the "Great Acceleration [ http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html ]," roughly coincides with this nuclear marker, as does the advent of plastics and other remnants of industrial society, dubbed technofossils [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/i-just-want-to-say-one-word-to-you-plastiglomerate1/ ] by Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, the geologist in charge of the group that is advocating for incorporating the Anthropocene into the geologic time scale. The radionuclides can then serve as what geologists call a Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), more commonly known as a "golden spike." Perhaps the most famous such golden spike is the thin layer of iridium found in rock exposed near El Kef, Tunisia, that tells of the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and thus marked the end of the Cretaceous Period about 65 million years ago.
Lewis and Maslin reject this radionuclide spike because it is not tied to a "world-changing event," at least not yet, though it is a clear signal in the rock. On the other hand, their Orbis spike in 1610 reflects both the most recent CO2 nadir as well as the redistribution of plants and animals around the world around that time, a literal changing of the world.
Much like the golden spike that marks the end of the dinosaurs, the proposed Orbis spike itself would be tied to the low point of atmospheric CO2 concentrations [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-levels-for-february-eclipsed-prehistoric-highs/ ] around 1610, as recorded in ice cores, where tiny trapped bubbles betray past atmospheres. Further geologic evidence will come from the appearance of corn pollen in sediment cores taken in Europe and Asia at that time, among other indicators that will complement the CO2 record. Therefore, scientists looking at ice cores, mud or even rock will find this epochal shift in the future.
The CO2 drop coincides with what climatologists call the little ice age [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/volcanoes-may-have-sparked/ ]. That cooling event may have been tied to regenerated forests and other plants growing on some 50 million hectares of land abandoned by humans after the mass death brought on by disease and warfare, Lewis and Maslin suggest. And it wasn't just the death of millions of Americans, as many as three-quarters of the entire population of two continents. The enslavement (or death) of as many as 28 million Africans for labor in the new lands also may have added to the climate impact. The population of the regions of northwestern Africa most affected by the slave trade did not begin to recover until the end of the 19th century. In other words, from 1600 to 1900 or so swathes of that region may have been regrowing forest, enough to draw down CO2, just like the regrowth of the Amazon and the great North American woods, though this hypothesis remains in some dispute.
Whether in 1610, 1944 or 50,000 B.C., the new designation would mean we are living in a new Anthropocene epoch, part of the Quaternary Period, which started more 2.5 million years ago with the advent of the cyclical growth and retreat of massive glaciers. The Quaternary is part of the Cenozoic, or "recent life," Era, which began 66 million years ago, which is, in turn, part of the Phanerozoic ("revealed life") Eon, which started 541 million years ago and encompasses all of complex life that has ever lived on this planet. In the end, the Anthropocene might supplant its old rival the Holocene. "It is only designated an epoch, when other interglacials are not, because back in the 18th century geologists thought humans were a very recent species, arriving via divine intervention or evolving on Earth in the Holocene," Lewis argues, but scientists now know Homo sapiens arose more than 200,000 years ago in the Pleistocene epoch. "Humans are a Pleistocene species, so the reason for calling the Holocene an epoch is a relic of the past."
Maslin suggests downgrading the Holocene to a stage within the Pleistocene, like other interglacial spans in the geologic record. But Zalasiewicz disagrees with this bid to get rid of the Holocene. "I don't see the need," he says. "Systematic tracing of a Holocene / Anthropocene boundary globally would be a very illuminating process in all sorts of ways."
The changes wrought by humans over the course of the last several centuries, if not longer, will echo in the future, whether in the form of transplanted species, like earthworms or cats, crop pollen in lake sediments or even entire fossilized cities [ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-mines-tunnels-and-drilling-scar-earth-permanently/ ]. Still, whether the Anthropocene started tens, hundreds or thousands of years ago, it accounts for a minute fraction of Earth's history. And this new epoch could end quickly or endure through millennia, depending on the choices our species makes now. "Embracing the Anthropocene reverses 500 years of scientific discoveries that have made humans more and more insignificant," Maslin notes. "We argue that Homo sapiens are central to the future of the only place where life is known to exist."
Spanish Conquest of the Incas Caused Air Pollution to Spike
The abandoned city of Machu Picchu is one legacy of the Spanish conquest of the Incas. Traces of air pollution in a Peruvian ice cap are another. (Laurie Chamberlain/Corbis)
A sample of Peruvian ice has revealed a surge in pollution linked to mining that wasn't exceeded until the Industrial Revolution
By Sarah Zielinski February 9, 2015
The arrival of the Spanish in South America in the late 16th century heralded the destruction of the once mighty Inca empire—and triggered a surge in air pollution levels that was not exceeded until the 20th century.
Paolo Gabrielli [ http://esn.osu.edu/people/gabrielli ] of Ohio State University and his colleagues measured a variety of trace elements—including lead, bismuth and arsenic—in the Quelccaya core to track the history of mining and metallurgy in South America from 793 to 1989. Those elements can be spewed into the atmosphere during the extraction and refining of various metals. To verify the ice core data, the team compared it with other types of environmental records, such as peat collected in Tierra del Fuego off the southern tip of South America, and snow from the Coats Land region of Antarctica. The research [ http://www.pnas.org/content/112/8/2349 ] appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The levels of trace elements were low and mostly stable before the rise of the Inca Empire in the mid-13th century. There were a few exceptions, but the researchers attribute those to volcanic eruptions in the Andes. Around 1480 came the first big spike that can be attributed to humans—a jump in bismuth levels in the ice. At that time, the Inca Empire was expanding, and the Inca began to use bismuth deposits to make a new type of bronze alloy. Archaeologists have found artifacts made of this bismuth bronze [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/223/4636/585 ] at the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu [ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-road-machu-picchu-discovered-180951733/ ].
But it was the end of the Inca Empire that heralded the biggest increases in air pollution prior to the Industrial Revolution. After the Spanish conquered the Incas [ http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/exploring-the-early-americas/pizarro-and-the-incas.html ] in 1533, levels of chromium, molybdenum, antimony and lead began to rise, probably because of Spanish efforts to mine the region for metals. Silver, for instance, was extracted from a mineral called argentiferous galena that also contains lead, and the refining process would have emitted metal-laden dust.
These Spanish silver coins were recovered from a shipwreck in the Bahamas in the 17th century. (Jeffrey L. Rotman/Corbis)
Metal deposits rose until about 1700 then remained consistent until 1830, when they began to decrease. That pattern matches South American history—the region underwent a series of wars of independence [ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/331694/history-of-Latin-America/60878/The-wars-of-independence-1808-26 ] in the early 19th century. During that time, “rebel and royalist armies destroyed machinery, killed draft animals, and damaged mines and refineries," the researchers note. "In addition, the scarcity of both [mercury] and labor for amalgamation, lack of transportation infrastructure, dearth of capital, and debilitating fiscal policies all contributed to stagnation in the mining industry during this time.”
The amounts of trace elements in the ice core continued to follow the region’s history, increasing at times when mining activities were known to increase, such as in the early 20th century. Scientists are interested in these records of past air pollution in part because there is an ongoing argument about what constitutes the start of the Anthropocene [ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/have-humans-really-created-new-geologic-age-180952865/ ], a proposed geologic time interval marked by an increase in human activities that have left a mark on Earth. The data in the Quelccaya ice core highlights “the difficulty in defining an unequivocal onset of the Anthropocene,” says Gabrielli.
The start of the Industrial Revolution [ http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/bas_research/science_briefings/icecorebriefing.php ], and the resulting pollution from the rapid increase in the burning of fossil fuels, has been suggested as a possible start to the Anthropocene. But other time periods have also left behind traces. Lead [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/265/5180/1841 ] from the mining and refining of metals during the Greek, Roman and Medieval periods has been found in Greenland ice cores, for instance.
That suggests “that this new epoch emerged discontinuously through space and time during human history,” Gabrielli says. “In other words, our data challenge the concept of the onset of the Anthropocene as a synchronous global discontinuity in the global geological record.”
Rand Paul, Vaccinations and the (Not So) Secret History of White Supremacy
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (Ed Reinke/AP)
Greg Grandin on March 12, 2015 - 2:59 PM ET
Last month, Senator Rand Paul said [ http://www.vox.com/2015/2/3/7966975/rand-paul-vaccine ] a few confusing things about vaccines, leading some to ask: Is he or is he not an anti-vaxxer? In an interview with CNBC’s Kelly Evans, the senator from Kentucky stated that he had heard of “many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.” Then a recording surfaced of an earlier 2009 conversation, where Paul engaged in the kind of wild linkages that libertarians have become famous for: Social Security leads to serfdom and flu shots put us on the death march to the gulag. “The first sort of thing you see with martial law is mandates,” Paul said [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/02/03/rand-paul-once-compared-mandatory-vaccination-to-martial-law/ ], “and they’re talking about making [the flu vaccine] mandatory.”
An unexceptional statement. Senator Paul is a history buff. And as an ophthalmologist, he’s interested in the history of science. Except that anyone who actually knows the history of the smallpox vaccine knows that it was anything but voluntary, at least for the many African and African-American slaves the vaccine was experimented on (including by Thomas Jefferson) and whose blood streams served as the best and cheapest way to transport the vaccine across the Americas.
The ideal of freedom they champion was born in chattel slavery, by the need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another’s absolute slavishness. And try as they might, this patrimony is inescapable: individual supremacy is white supremacy. It’s a point I’ve argued in The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (it’s just been released in paperback [ http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Necessity-Slavery-Freedom-Deception/dp/1250062101 ] and, in case I haven’t mentioned it, NPR’s Fresh Air named [ http://www.npr.org/2014/12/15/370338890/sometimes-you-cant-pick-just-10-maureen-corrigans-favorite-books-of-2014 , http://greggrandin.com/ ] it the best book of 2014, including non-fiction and fiction). A bit of the book describes the role the slave system had in the development of modern medicine, including the smallpox vaccine.
And not just in Spanish and Portuguese America. Harriet Washington, in Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present [ https://books.google.com/books?id=q0bMejttqgEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false , http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/medical-apartheid-harriet-a-washington/1100623226 ], documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson preformed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system. Slave ships were floating laboratories, offering researchers a chance to examine the course of diseases in fairly controlled, quarantined environments. Doctors and medical researchers could take advantage of high mortality rates to identify a bewildering number of symptoms, classify them as diseases and hypothesize about their causes. That information then filtered into the larger medical community. Rand Paul is an ophthalmologist, and for an example of how that profession benefited from slavery, read about the 1819 case of the French slave ship Rôdeur, which I write [ http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Necessity-Slavery-Freedom-Deception/dp/1250062101 ] about in The Empire of Necessity.
During the late January measles outbreak, which many blamed on the anti-vaxxer movement, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig was one of the few commentators who smartly pointed out [ http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120877/disneyland-measles-outbreak-caused-distrust-american-society ] that anti-vaccination parents merely reflect the “very virtues American culture readily recommends,” including “individualism, self-determination, and a dim, almost cynical view of common goods like public health.” The idea of “rugged individualism,” Bruenig writes, “functions in a feedback loop with American politics.”
That feedback loop, which has its origins in the history of American slavery, has two basic beats: Individual rights (to property, guns, speech, etc.) are freedom. Social rights (to education, medicine, and a decent, dignified life) are slavery.
On March 6, 2015, President Obama delivered remarks on the one-year anniversary of the My Brother’s Keeper initiative at a Town Hall at St. Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina.
*
Remarks by the President in Town Hall at St. Benedict College, Columbia, SC
St. Benedict College Columbia, South Carolina March 06, 2015 2:10 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, South Carolina! (Applause.) Thank you! Well, it is good to see everybody. It is good to be back in South Carolina. Now, if you all have a seat, take a seat. If you don’t have a seat, I’m sorry. (Laughter.)
I want to say thank you to Benedict College for your hospitality. (Applause.) I want to thank Tiana for the great introduction. Give her a big round of applause. (Applause.) We have all kinds of luminaries and dignitaries, and big shots here today -- (laughter) -- but I’m just going to mention a couple of them.
One of the finest gentlemen and finest legislators we have in the country, your congressman, Jim Clyburn. (Applause.) Your outstanding mayor, Steve Benjamin. (Applause.) The president of this great institution, Dr. David Swinton. (Applause.) Go, Tigers!
It’s been a while since I was in South Carolina. In fact, I got -- it’s been too long. It has. I’m not going to lie. I love you, and I’ve been loving you. It’s just I’ve had a lot of stuff to do since I last saw you. But it was wonderful to be backstage because I got a chance to see so many of the wonderful people that I worked with back in 2008. If it was not for this great state, the Palmetto State, if it was not for all the people who had, at a grassroots level, gone door-to-door and talked to folks, and got everybody fired up and ready to go -- (applause) -- if it hadn’t been for all of you, I might not be President. And I'm truly grateful for that. (Applause.) I'm truly grateful for that.
I hope that you don’t mind, I also brought another good friend -- the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder. (Applause.) We decided to take a Friday road trip together, because Eric has not only been a great friend, but an extraordinary Attorney General. As some of you know, he is going to go enjoy himself and is going to retire from public service. But I know he’s still going to be doing great things around the country. I'm really going to miss him.
Now, I am not here to make a long speech. I’m here to make a short speech -- because what I want to do is spend most of my time interacting, having a conversation. I want to get questions; I want to hear what you guys are thinking about. This is a good thing for me, to get out of Washington and talk to normal folk. (Laughter.)
And I thought it was appropriate to come here because tomorrow I'll be visiting Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And one of the things I might talk about -- I’m still working on my speech, but it might come up -- is the meaning of Selma for your generation. Because Selma is not just about commemorating the past. It's about honoring the legends who helped change this country through your actions today, in the here and now. Selma is now. Selma is about the courage of ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they believe they can change the country, that they can shape our nation’s destiny. Selma is about each of us asking ourselves what we can do to make America better.
And, historically, it’s been young people like you who helped lead that march. You think about somebody like John Lewis who was one of the key leaders and will be joining us tomorrow. He was 23 when he helped lead that march that transformed the country. You think about the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, or the 12 year-old boy who was elected head of the NAACP youth chapter who grew up to be Jim Clyburn. (Applause.) It was young people.
It was young people who stubbornly insisted on justice, stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is that transformed not just the country but transformed the world. You can see that spirit reflected in a poster put out by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. It had a picture of a young John Lewis kneeling in protest against an all-white swimming pool. And it reads: “Come let us build a new world together.”
Come let us build a new world together. That's the story of America. That's why immigrants came here -- the idea of building a new world together -- not just settling on what is, but imagining what might be. Insisting we live up to our highest ideals, our deepest values.
That’s why I wanted to come here to Columbia, and here to Benedict College, because we all know we still have work to do. We’ve got to ensure not just the absence of formal, legal, oppression, but the presence of an active, dynamic opportunity. Good jobs that pay good wages; a good start for every child; health care for every family; a higher education that prepares you for the world without crippling you with debt; a fairer and more just legal and criminal justice system. (Applause.)
Now, the good news is we’re in much better shape now than we were six years ago. This morning, we learned that our economy created nearly 300,000 new jobs last month, the unemployment rate went down -- (applause) -- the unemployment rate ticked down to 5.5 percent, which is the lowest it’s been since the spring of 2008. (Applause.) Our businesses have now added more than 200,000 jobs a month for the past year. And we have not seen a streak like that in 37 years, since Jimmy Carter was President. (Applause.) All told, over the past five years, our businesses have created nearly 12 million new jobs.
And what’s more, the unemployment rate for African Americans is actually falling faster than the overall unemployment rate -- which makes sense because it went up faster, too, during the recession. (Applause.) But it's still too high. The unemployment rate across the country and here in South Carolina is still higher than we want, which means we’ve got more work to do. And we’ve got to make sure those are good jobs that pay a living wage and have benefits with them.
So we can’t let up now. We’ve got to do everything we can to keep this progress going. This community, I know, is doing its part to prepare students for this new economy. Programs like YouthBuild -- (applause) -- are giving young people who may have gotten off track a chance to earn a degree and get the skills they need for the for the 21st century. CityYear AmeriCorps -- (applause) -- in the house -- I see their jackets -- they’re working with the public schools in Columbia to increase graduation rates. The Benedict College community is doing outstanding work beyond your walls. (Applause.) We put you on the Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. You earned that honor. (Applause.)
So as long as I’m President, we’re going to keep doing everything we can to make sure that young people like you can achieve your dreams. We can’t do it for you; you’ve got to do it yourselves. But we can give you the tools you need. We can give you a little bit of a helping hand and a sense of possibility and direction. You got to do the work, but we can make it a little bit easier for you.
That’s why, one year ago, we launched what we call My Brother’s Keeper. It's an initiative that challenges communities to bring together nonprofits and foundations and businesses and government, all focused on creating more pathways for young people to succeed. And this week, we put out a report showing the progress that’s been made. That progress is thanks to the nearly 200 local leaders who’ve accepted what we call My Brother’s Keeper’s Challenge -- including Mayor Benjamin and the mayors of Johnston and Holly Hill. They’re doing great work mentoring young people, giving them a new path for success. (Applause.)
I’m hugely optimistic about the progress we can make together this year and in the years ahead, because ultimately, I’m optimistic about all of you. Young people in this country make me optimistic. The future we can build together. This new world that we can build together. I’m proud of you. But we got a lot more work to do, -- starting right now, because I’m about to take your questions.
Thank you very much, everybody. (Applause.) Thank you.
All right, got to make sure the mic works. So here’s how this is going to work. You raise your hand. If I call on you, then wait for the mic so everybody can hear your question. If you could stand up, introduce yourself. Try to keep your question relatively short. I’ll try to keep my answer relatively short. That way we can get more questions and answers in. The only other thing -- the only other rule is we’re going to go girl-boy-girl-boy, just to make it fair -- (laughter) -- so it’s not always just the boys thinking they know everything. (Laughter.)
So who wants to start? She says it’s her birthday so we’ll call on her first. All right. (Applause.) Wait for the microphone. Go ahead and stand up. We’ve got to be able to see you. Happy birthday.
Q Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: What’s your name?
Q My name is Daria Hamilton. I really don’t have a question, I just wanted you to talk to me. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. She doesn’t have a question. Happy birthday. (Laughter and applause.) All right. Next time you got to have a question. (Laughter.) But it is your birthday, so we’re going to make an exception.
Woman right there in the back. We’re going to go -- I know I said boy-girl-boy-girl, but that didn’t count because she didn’t ask a question.
Right there, yes. Yes, you had your hand up. Yes. Right. Yes, you! Go ahead.
Q Hello.
THE PRESIDENT: Hello.
Q I’m a native Chicagoan and I welcome you.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, what are you doing down here?
Q I love it.
THE PRESIDENT: It’s warmer, isn’t it?
Q I’m down here to protect the environment.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay.
Q And I wanted to thank you for vetoing the XL Keystone pipeline. Thank you. Thank you! (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Okay.
Q You are what we worked for. You are what we hoped for.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that. Do you have a question for me?
Q Yes. Do you think that will stop the XL Keystone pipeline?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, for those of you who haven’t been following this, the Keystone pipeline is a proposed pipeline that runs from Canada through the United States down to the Gulf of Mexico. Its proponents argue that it would be creating jobs in the United States. But the truth is it’s Canadian oil that’s then going to go to the world market. It will probably create about a couple thousand construction jobs for a year or two, but only create about 300 permanent jobs.
The reason that a lot of environmentalists are concerned about it is the way that you get the oil out in Canada is an extraordinarily dirty way of extracting oil. And obviously, there are always risks in piping a lot of oil through Nebraska farmland and other parts of the country.
What we’ve done is I vetoed it because the Congress was trying to short-circuit a traditional process that we go through. I haven’t made a final determination on it, but what I’ve said is, is that we’re not going to authorize a pipeline that benefits largely a foreign company if it can’t be shown that it is safe and if it can’t be shown that overall it would not contribute to climate change.
Now, a lot of young people here, you may not be worrying about climate change. Although it’s very cold down here, you can’t attribute a couple days of cold weather, or a couple days of hot weather, to the climate changing. But the pattern overall is that the planet is getting warmer. That’s undeniable. And it’s getting warmer at a faster rate than even the scientists expect.
And you might think, well, you know, getting warmer, that’s no big deal -- folks in South Carolina, we’re used to dealing with hot weather; we can manage. But understand that when you start having overall global temperatures go up, even if it means more snow in some places, or more rain in some places -- it’s not going to be hotter in every single place, but the overall temperature is going up -- that starts changing weather patterns across the globe. It starts raising ocean levels. It starts creating more drought and wildfires in some places.
It means that there are entire countries that may suddenly no longer be able to grow crops, which means people go hungry, which then creates conflict. It means diseases that used to be just in tropical places start creeping up, and suddenly we’ve got a whole new set of, say, insect-borne diseases, like malaria, that we thought we had gotten rid of, now they’re suddenly in places like the United States.
We start running out of water. It puts stresses and strains on our infrastructure. Hurricanes become more powerful when the water is warmer, which means a lot of our coastal cities and towns are put at risk.
I say all that because it may not be the thing that you are worried about right now. Right now you’re worried about getting a job, or right now you’re worried about is your girlfriend still mad at you -- (laughter) -- or right now you’re thinking about just getting through classes and exams. I understand that. But what you have to appreciate, young people, is this will affect you more than old people like me. I’ll be gone when the worst of this hits. And the disruptions -- economic, social, security disruptions that it can cause can make your life and the lives of your children much harder and much worse. And if you don’t stop it at a certain point, you can’t stop it at all, and it could be catastrophic.
I just want you to understand, what I just described, it’s not science fiction, it’s not speculation. This is what the science tells us. So we’ve got to worry about it -- which is part of the reason why we’ve invested in things like green energy -- trying to increase fuel-efficiency standards on cars; trying to make sure that we use more solar and wind power; trying to find new energy sources that burn clean instead of dirty. And everybody here needs to be supportive and thinking about that because you’re the ones who are going to have to live with it.
And I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve doubled the amount of clean energy produced since I’ve been President. (Applause.) We’re increasing fuel-efficiency standards on cars, which will save you, by the way, money at the pump. Don’t think that just because gas prices are low right now -- that’s nice, it puts some more money in your pocket, but that’s not going to last. So don’t start going out and saying, oh, I’m going to buy a big gas guzzler now -- (laughter) -- right? Because the trajectory of the future is that gas -- oil is going to get more expensive. It’s going to get harder to extract. We’re going to have to transition overtime to a new economy.
And there’s huge opportunity. We can create a lot of jobs in those areas if we are focused on it and planning for it.
All right? But thank you very much for the question. (Applause.)
All right. It's a gentleman’s turn. We got any mics back here? I just wanted to make sure. Let’s see. This young man right here in the red tie, looking sharp. (Laughter.) Do you always wear a tie, or you just wore it today?
Q I wear it often.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. Good. (Laughter.) I like that. Looking clean. Go ahead.
Q My name is Brandon Pope, graduating senior here at Benedict College, majoring in business management.
THE PRESIDENT: Excellent.
Q My question is, tuition is very high in the United States.
THE PRESIDENT: Can I make it lower? (Laughter.) Is that the question? (Laughter.)
Q While in other countries it's free. What are some of your plans to assist those that are having trouble paying for school? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. First of all, let me just say this is a cause near and dear to my heart because, Michelle and I, we weren’t born into wealthy families, so the only way we got our education was because we got help -- loans, grants, work-study programs. If we hadn’t had that available to us we could not have pursued the education we did and couldn’t have achieved what we achieved.
And even with all the help we got, we had so much debt when we got married that we had negative liabilities -- (laughter) -- we just joined together our negative liabilities. And it took us like 10 years to pay off our debt. For the first 10 years of our marriage, our loans were more expensive than our mortgage. It was only about two years or three years before I was elected a U.S. senator that I paid off my loans.
Now, the truth is that, historically, the reason America succeeded so well is we’ve always been ahead of the curve in educating our population. We were the first country to say let’s have free public high schools. When folks who had fought in World War II came back, we gave them a G.I. Bill. The middle class helped to get built because people got new skills. And through much of the ‘60s and the ‘70s and the ‘80s, our public university system was hugely important in giving people a pathway into the middle class.
Now, here’s what happened. Typically, state legislatures started cutting support for state universities. Those state universities and colleges then decided, well, we’re going to have to jack up tuition to make up for the money that we’ve lost because the state is not giving us as much. And that’s how tuition started to get higher and higher and higher.
Now, what I’ve done since I became President was a couple things. We significantly expanded the Pell grant program, with the help of people like Jim Clyburn. (Applause.) It used to be that the student loan program was run through the banks and the banks would take a cut. They were making billions of dollars on student loans. We said why do we have to go through the banks -- let’s just give it directly to the students, save that money, and give it to more students and increase the size of the Pell grant.
(Applause.)
And we initiated a program that many of you can still take advantage of, and that is we capped the percentage of your income that you have to pay in repaying your student loans so that if you decide to become a teacher, or you decide to become a social worker, you get a job just starting off that’s not paying you a lot of money but is in the field that you want, you don’t have to say no because you can’t afford it. It's only going to be 10 percent of your income, so it makes your debt payments manageable.
But what we still have to do is -- to deal with the question you pointed out -- which is, how do we just keep tuition lower generally. Now, the big proposal that I put forward this year is let’s make community colleges free for those who -- (applause.) Now, it would be conditioned. You would have to keep up a certain GPA. You’d have to put in some sweat equity into the thing. But the point is those first two years were free. The advantage of that is, first of all, a lot of young people start at community colleges and they may not want a four-year degree, but they can get a two-year degree that gives them the skills they need to get a job and not have any debt.
Even if you want to go to a four-year college, for a lot of young people, it may be a good option to go to a community college for the first two years, then transfer your credits. And you've at least saved half of what you would otherwise spend on your four-year degree. And we can do this just by closing some loopholes in the tax system that gives companies the ability to avoid paying the taxes that they owe.
So far at least, I haven’t gotten the kind of support I’d like from some of my Republican friends in the Senate and House of Representatives. But we're going to keep on working on it because it’s a smart idea. (Applause.) Look, I want ultimately -- ultimately, I want at least the first two years of college to be just like public high schools are now. And everybody -- because it is very hard nowadays to find a well-paying job without some form of higher education -- without some form of higher education.
Even if you end up working in a factory these days -- you go into a modern factory, it’s all computerized and you’ve got to know math and you've got to be able to function in a high-tech environment. So it’s a proposal whose time has come. We may not be able to convince Republicans to get it done this year, but we're going to just keep on going at this. Ultimately this is what is going to keep America at the cutting-edge. And if we're able to do that, then we're going to be able save you a little bit of money and you won’t have the same kind of debt that I had to take out when I got my degree.
All right? Thank you for the question. (Applause.)
It’s a young lady’s turn now. That young lady in the orange right there. It’s hard to miss -- (laughter) -- got the yellow and the orange. Did you wear that just so I’d call on you? (Laughter.)
Q Thank you for being here, President Obama. I am a public relations consultant and a community organizer. I am, most proudly, the parent of two young black males. Sit down for a moment because I have an 18-year-older and, yes, I have recently birthed a one-year-old.
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, oh. (Laughter.) That's a big spread. (Laughter.)
Q Seventeen years.
THE PRESIDENT: It took you that long to forget what it was like. (Laughter.)
Q I have a quick question for you, primarily about my 18-year-older. He is a scholarship student-athlete at South Carolina State University. I’m very proud of the fact that he is there. (Applause.) But as I’m sure you are aware, HBCUs -- in particular, South Carolina State University is facing a bit of an uphill battle at this moment. I have a question for you for students like him that are there, others across the world that are facing situations that are insurmountable and challenging -- how do you stay motivated, and what particular advice do you have for me to take back to Lenard, to tell him to stay encouraged, continue to keep the hope alive, and do his best? Thank you. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I mean, the main thing you should tell him is listen to your mom. (Laughter.) I hope you recorded that. So -- you did? Look, I’m trying to remember what it was like being 18 and 19 and 20. It’s been a while. But the one thing that I always say to young people coming up these days is you should be wildly optimistic about your possibilities in your future.
So often when we watch the nightly news or read the paper, all you're hearing about is bad stuff going on. It just seems like, man, there’s war and strife, and folks are arguing and yelling, and conflict. But the truth is, is that today, right now, you are more likely to be healthier, wealthier, less discriminated against, have more opportunity, less likely to be caught up in violence than probably any time in human history.
The opportunities for you to get information and to get an education and expose yourself to the entire world because of technology is unmatched. It’s never been like this before. Your ability to start your own business, or carve your own path has never been greater. So my first and general point is, do not get cynical about what’s possible.
The second thing is, you’ve got to work really hard. And there’s no free lunch and you can’t make excuses. In particular, when I’m talking to young African American men, sometimes I think the sense is, cards are stacked against us and discrimination is still out there, and so it’s easy sometimes just to kind of pull back and say, well, you know, this is just too hard.
And this is part of why it’s so important for us to remember Selma tomorrow. It’s not as hard as it was 50 years ago. It’s not as hard as it was when Jim Clyburn was coming up, and he’s now one of the most powerful men in the country -- (applause) -- growing up right here in South Carolina.
So there are no excuses not to put in the effort. There are no excuses not to hit the books. If you want a good education in this country, you can get a good education, even if you are in a bad school. And I’ll be honest with you, we’ve got to do some work to make schools more equal. (Applause.) Right here in South Carolina, there are still schools that were built back in the 1800s that haven’t been repaired and don’t have decent restrooms and don’t have proper books. (Applause.)
So we’ve still got to fight to make sure that every child, not just some, have equal opportunity. That’s a worthy fight. But you can still learn even in that school. Even in the most rundown school, if you’re putting in the effort, you can get a good education. So you can’t make excuses. Even as you advocate for justice, you’ve got to make sure that you’re also taking advantage of the opportunities that you currently have.
But that brings me to one last piece of advice for young people, and that is, think about more than just yourself. (Applause.) Think about how you can have an impact beyond yourself. The people who I know who are really happy and successful as they get older, it’s because they have an impact on something other than just their own situation. (Applause.) They’re not just thinking about how do I get mine. They’re thinking about how does everybody get their fair share. (Applause.) And when they do that, that gives meaning to your life; that gives purpose to your life; that gives you influence and a sense of purpose.
And you’ve got to have a sense of purpose beyond just the almighty dollar. I mean, look, we live in a free market society, and one of the things that sets America apart is business and entrepreneurship and hustle, and folks are out there just -- they’re trying to make a new product or create a new service, and the profit motive is strong. And that’s good. That’s important. But if that’s all you’re thinking about, and you’re not thinking about how you can also have an impact through your church, or if you’re not thinking about how you can treat your employees right when you do get a business, if you’re not thinking once you do make it what am I giving back to make sure that I’m giving a helping hand to the folks coming up behind me -- if you’re not thinking -- (applause) -- if you're not thinking that way, you won’t be able to get through the tough times. What gets you through tough times is that sense of purpose. And that purpose cannot just be about yourself, it’s got to be about something larger. (Applause.)
All right. Oh, we got a young man right here. He’s standing tall. Go ahead. Yes, sir.
Q My name is Trace Adams.
THE PRESIDENT: Hey, Trace. How old are you, man?
Q Ten.
THE PRESIDENT: So you’re in fifth grade?
Q Fourth.
THE PRESIDENT: Fourth grade? You’re a tall guy.
Q Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: So what’s going on, Trace?
Q I was just wondering -- I’m 10, and I was just wondering when you were interested in being a President.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it wasn’t when I was 10. Are you thinking about it? (Laughter.)
Q A little bit -- yes, sir. (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. All right. I mean, you’re definitely ahead of me. Now, just remember, you got to wait until you’re 35 -- that’s in the Constitution. So you got at least 25 years to prepare.
I did not think about -- when I was 10, I wasn’t thinking about being President. I think when I was 10 I was interested in being an architect. I was interested in the idea of like building buildings, and I thought that was pretty cool. And then I went through a bunch of stuff, and for a while I thought I might be a basketball player -- and it turned out I was too slow and I couldn’t jump. (Laughter.) And so I stopped thinking that. And then I became interested in being a lawyer, and I did become a lawyer.
But what are you interested in right now? What subjects are you interested in school?
Q Social studies, actually.
THE PRESIDENT: Social studies? So you’re interested in public policy. Are you starting to read the newspapers and things? Do you discuss -- is that your dad behind you?
FATHER: That’s me.
Q Yes, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: And you discuss the issues with your dad and stuff?
Q Oh, yes, sir -- definitely.
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, yes, I can tell you do. (Laughter.) Okay.
Well, I think the most important thing is to just make sure that you work hard in school. I think it’s really good if you get involved in like some service projects and help out people in your community, whether it’s through the Scouts or your church, or at school, or some other program, so that you get used to trying to help other people.
Make sure you graduate from college. And then, who knows, you might end up being -- I might just be warming up the seat for you. (Laughter.) And if you become President, I want you to remind everybody how, when you talked to President Obama, he said, go for it. All right? Don’t forget me. (Laughter and applause.)
All right. That’s Trace -- Trace, who’s 10 years old and already thinking -- he’s already thinking about public policy. I want all the folks in college to just notice he’s reading the papers and talking public policy. (Laughter.) So if all you’re doing is watching the ballgame -- don’t let 10-year-old Trace embarrass you now. (Laughter.)
All right, it’s a young lady’s turn. Well, it’s not going to help you just to be all like -- you got like five people all helping you out. I’ll call on one of the young ladies there who’s part of City Year. They’re wearing the City -- did you do paper, scissor, stone? Is that what happened? (Laughter.) All right. You all did that fast, too. It’s like you guys do that for everything. Where are we going to lunch? (Laughter.)
Q Well, good afternoon, Mr. President. My name is Tarissa Young Clayborn. I am also a native of Illinois, so it’s good to see you here. I am also a proud City Year-AmeriCorps member at Hyde Park Elementary School here in Columbia.
THE PRESIDENT: There you go. Fantastic. So there’s a Hyde Park school here?
Q Yes, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Because there’s a Hyde Park in Chicago back home.
Q Yes, there is a Hyde Park in Chicago. So my question for you --
THE PRESIDENT: Look, he’s like, “Hey-ay.” (Laughter).
Q My question for you, Mr. President: How can City Year and other AmeriCorps programs support the goals of My Brother’s Keeper?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, City Year, AmeriCorps -- for those young people who are thinking about public service or want to serve before they go on to graduate school, or in some cases, want to get involved before they go to college, AmeriCorps programs are an outstanding way to help fund your college education.
And City Year is one of the great AmeriCorps programs that we have. In addition to them all getting these spiffy red jackets, they end up being placed in communities all across the country doing -- working in schools, working in communities in need, working on housing programs -- all kinds of different stuff. And we're very proud of them.
My Brother’s Keeper -- the idea, the genesis of this came after the Trayvon Martin verdict and obviously there was great controversy about how the case was handled. And Eric Holder, by the way, has done an outstanding job getting our Justice Department to stay focused on -- (applause) -- the equal application of the law at local and state, as well as federal levels.
But what I realized is also part of the goal of making sure that young African American men succeed, young Latino men succeed, young white men who don't have opportunity succeed, is to make sure that everybody has got a path that leads in a positive direction. And you can't wait until somebody is in trouble before you start intervening. You got to start when they're younger.
Because the statistics show that if a child, by the time they're in third grade, is reading at grade level, they are far more likely to be able to graduate and succeed. If a child doesn't get suspended or disciplined in school, they're far less likely to get involved in the criminal justice system. If they get through high school without being involved in the criminal justice system, they are far less likely than to ever get involved in the criminal justice system.
So there are these points where we know that if you intervene in a timely way, it will make a difference. So what we’ve done is to get pledges from foundations and philanthropies; we’ve recruited businesses; we’ve gotten the NBA involved; we’ve gotten every agency in our government involved. And we’ve got cities -- and your Mayor is participating in this, so Columbia is participating in this -- in coming up with local plans for how are we going to give opportunities, pathways for mentorship, apprenticeship, after-school programs, job search, college prep -- you name it. And each community is coming up with its own programs and plans, and then we are partnering with them and helping match them up with folks in their area who are also interested in resourcing these initiatives.
And AmeriCorps I think is a key part of this because where a city or a state or a local community has a good plan, there is an opportunity for City Year or any other AmeriCorps program to be plugged in to that plan and become part of that plan. And my hope is, is that over the next several years and beyond my presidency, because I’ll stay involved in this, that in every city around the country we start providing the kinds of help that is needed to make sure our young men are on the right track. (Applause.)
Now, I want to point out, by the way, I’m not neglecting young woman, because, as you might expect, Michelle would not let me. (Laughter.) So she’s initiative programs for mentorships. And we’ve got an entire office in the White House for women and girls that's focused on some of these same initiatives. But there is a particular challenge that we face for African American and Latino men, young men of color. And we’ve got to be honest about that. We're losing a large portion of our generation -- or a big chunk of this generation and the previous generation.
I was talking to my -- we have something called the Council of Economic Advisers. And even though there’s been good job growth, really strong job growth, and unemployment has come down, we’ve gotten through the recession -- the labor participation rate, the number of people who are actively seeking work, still is low compared to what it was 10 years ago. And we're asking ourselves why.
Now, part of it is the population is getting older, so more people are retiring and not working. But that's not the only reason. In the African American community, a big reason is that you've got young people with criminal records who are finding themselves unemployable.
Now, that's not just bad for that individual, that's bad for their children, that's bad for the community. So this is part of the reason why it’s so important for us to rethink how we approach nonviolent drug offenses, which is responsible for a lot of the churn of young men of color going through the criminal justice system. (Applause.) We got to reexamine how sentencing is working -- and make sure it’s done equally, by the way, because we know, statistically, it’s been demonstrated that African American men are more likely to be arrested than their counterparts, more likely to be searched, more likely to be prosecuted, and more likely to get stiffer sentences despite the fact that they are no more likely to use drugs or deal drugs than the general population. And that’s a problem. (Applause.)
So we’re going to have to look at reforms there. But for those who are already in the pipeline, we’ve also got to think about how do we help them get the kind of help that they need. And this is going to be something that I’m devoting a lot of energy to because this is not just a black or Hispanic problem, this is an American problem. (Applause.) If you’ve got a big chunk of your workforce that is not working, and that’s the youngest part of your workforce, and they’re never contributing to the economy and not paying taxes and not supporting Social Security, then the whole economy grows slower. Everybody is worse off.
So this is not an issue just for one group. This is an issue for everybody.
All right. (Laughter.) All right. It’s a young woman’s turn. It’s a young woman’s turn. I’ll be happy to sign your book. I know, you’ve been waving a lot, but it’s not going to help. (Laughter.) It’s a young woman’s turn. So let’s see -- this young lady way back in the back, right up there. Yes. I’m going to give -- make the mic person get some exercise.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Good afternoon, and welcome to South Carolina. My name is Simone Martin. I’m an attorney in this area with the Rutherford law firm. In fact, my boss, Representative and House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford is sitting right over there -- probably wondering why I’m not at the office. (Laughter.) But nevertheless --
THE PRESIDENT: Are you advertising for him? Was this like a whole -- (laughter.)
Q No, I’m just trying to keep my job.
THE PRESIDENT: Are you going to give like the number?
Q No, I’m just trying to keep my job.
THE PRESIDENT: “If you need representation” -- (laughter) -- “call Rutherford and Associates.” (Laughter.) All right, go ahead.
Q I have two questions for you. I hope that you’ll indulge me by addressing both. They’re quick -- or the second one is quick. The first one is, what can criminal defense attorneys, like myself and Mr. Rutherford, do to increase the number of federal pardons that are granted? The second question is, to whom do I need to speak to improve my chances of being selected as a White House fellow? Can you help me out? (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, okay. Well, let me address the non-self-interested question first. (Laughter.) I just had a discussion about the criminal justice system. One of the extraordinary powers that a President has is the power to commute sentences or to pardon somebody who’s already been sentenced. And when I came into office, for the first couple of years I noticed that I wasn’t really getting a lot of recommendations for pardons that -- at least not as many as I would expect. And many of them were from older folks. A lot of them were people just looking for a pardon so they could restore their gun rights. But sort of the more typical cases that I would have expected weren’t coming up.
So I asked Attorney General Holder to work with me to set up a new office, or at least a new approach, inside the Justice Department. Because historically, what happened was the President would get a big stack of recommendations and then he could sign off on them -- because obviously, I don’t have time to go through each request. And so what we’ve done now is open it up so that people are more aware of the process. And what you can do is contact the Justice Department. But essentially, we’re now working with the NAACP, we’re working with various public defenders offices and community organizations just to make people aware that this is a process that you can go through.
Now, typically we have a pretty strict set of criteria for whether we would even consider you for a pardon or commutation.
Eric, I assume that that’s available somewhere on the Justice Department website, is that correct?
ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDER: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. So my first suggestion would be to go to the Justice Department website. If the person doesn’t qualify because they may have served time but there were problems when they served time, or if it was a particularly violent crime, or they may just not fit the criteria where we would consider it -- a lot of what we’re focused on is non-violent drug offenses where somebody might have gotten 25 years, and she was the girlfriend of somebody and somehow got caught up, and since then has led an exemplary life, but now really wants to be able to start a new career or something like that. That’s the kind of person, typically, that would get through the process.
Now, in terms of the White House Fellows program, there’s a whole White House Fellows committee and it's complicated, and I don’t have any pull on it. (Laughter.) I do not put my thumb on the scale, because if I did I’d get into trouble. Because then people would say, he just put his friends on there. So you have got to go through the process. But you seem very well-qualified so good luck.
Q Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: You’re welcome. All right.
How many more questions do I got? I like to -- it looks like I'm okay. All right, you know what -- I'm going to just call on this gentleman. He’s been like waving and I have got to make sure he’s not waving -- because out of my periphery I just saw him the whole time. All right. Go ahead.
Q First, I have two questions. Firstly, would you sign my book?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I will sign your book.
Q All right. And I'm a student currently studying at the University of South Carolina.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. Go, Gamecocks! (Laughter.)
Q I see President Pastides is in the house, so it's good to see you, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: You're sucking up to the president, huh? (Laughter.)
Q My question, well, I guess it relates to the Michael Brown case. And I've just recently seen the report that suggested that there’s been grave injustices going on in Ferguson. And I'm trying to figure out why the Attorney General, Eric Holder, refused to press charges against the police officer. Why didn’t he face the federal charges?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I will answer that question. Now, that was two questions right now.
Q And I'm --
THE PRESIDENT: No, that's it. (Laughter.) You don't get a third question. Sit down. I called on you. Come on, sit down. (Laughter.) See, this is how folks will get you. My reporter friends here, they’re famous for doing that. They’ll be like, Mr. President, I've got a four-part question. (Laughter.) So you only get two. I will sign your book.
With respect to Ferguson, keep in mind that there are two separate issues involved. The first is the specific case of Officer Wilson and Michael Brown. And that is typically a charge that would be brought and dealt with at the state level and the local level. The federal government has a role only if it can show that there was a significant miscarriage of the justice system and had clear evidence -- now, I'm being overly technical, but basically the federal jurisdiction here is to make sure that this wasn’t just a completely wrong decision.
They don’t retry the whole thing all over again. They look to see whether or not, at the state level, due process and the investigation was conducted. And the standard for overturning that or essentially coming in on top of the state decision is very high. The finding that was made was that it was not unreasonable to determine that there was not sufficient evidence to charge Officer Wilson.
That was an objective, thorough, independent, federal investigation. We may never know exactly what happened, but Officer Wilson, like anybody else who is charged with a crime, benefits from due process and a reasonable doubt standard. And if there is uncertainty about what happened, then you can’t just charge him anyway just because what happened was tragic. That was the decision that was made. And I have complete confidence and stand fully behind the decision that was made by the Justice Department on that issue.
There is a second aspect to this, which is how does the Ferguson Police Department and the government of Ferguson, the municipality, treat its African American citizens when it comes to law enforcement. And there, the finding was very clear, and it’s available for everybody to read.
What we saw was that the Ferguson Police Department, in conjunction with the municipality, saw traffic stops, arrests, tickets as a revenue generator as opposed to serving the community, and that it systematically was biased against African Americans in that city who were stopped, harassed, mistreated, abused, called names, fined. And then it was structured so that they would get caught up in paying more and more fines that they couldn’t afford to pay or were made difficult for them to pay, which raised the amount of additional money that they had to pay. And it was an oppressive and abusive situation. And that is also the conclusion that the Justice Department arrived at.
The steps that now are to be taken is that the Justice Department has presented this evidence to the city of Ferguson, and the city of Ferguson has a choice to make. They’re basically going to have to decide, do they dispute the findings of the Justice Department -- and I shouldn’t comment on that aspect of it, although I will say what’s striking about the report is a lot of this was just using emails from the officials themselves. So it wasn’t like folks were just making it up. But the city of Ferguson will now have to make a decision: Are they going to enter into some sort of agreement with the Justice Department to fix what is clearly a broken and racially biased system? Or if they don’t, then the Justice Department has the capacity to sue the city for violations for the rights of the people of Ferguson. (Applause.)
Here’s the thing, the lesson that I would draw from this. I don’t think that what happens in Ferguson is typical. I think the overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers here in South Carolina and anyplace else -- young man, sit down, I’m in the middle of talking. All right, thank you. The overwhelming number of law enforcement officers have a really hard, dangerous job, and they do it well and they do it fairly, and they do it heroically. (Applause.) And I strongly believe that. And the overwhelming majority of police departments across the country are really thinking hard about how do we make sure that we are protecting and serving everybody equally.
And we need to honor those folks, and we need to respect them, and not just assume that they’ve got ill will or they’re doing a bad job.
But as is true in any part of our lives, as is true among politicians, as is true among business leaders, as is true among anybody, there are circumstances in which folks don't do a good job -- or worse, are doing things that are really unlawful or unjust or unfair.
And what happened in Ferguson is not a complete aberration. It’s not just a one-time thing. It’s something that happens. And one of the things that I think frustrated the people of Ferguson, in addition to the specific case of Michael Brown, was this sense of, you know what, we’ve been putting up for this for years, and now when we start talking about it, everybody is pretending like it’s just our imaginations, like we’re just paranoid, we’re just making this stuff up. And it turns out they weren’t just making it up. This was happening.
And so it’s important for all of us then to figure out how do we move together to fix it. How do people of good will in law enforcement, in the community, everybody work to fix it and find concrete solutions, and to have accountability and oversight and transparency in terms of how law enforcement works?
And one of the great things that we did out of a tragic situation was we were able to form a task force made up of law enforcement, police chiefs and community activists, including two of the activists who got the Ferguson marches and protests started. And they came up with a consensus document that was presented to me last week that was very specific in terms of how we can solve some of these problems -- how we can make sure that police departments provide data about who they’re stopping in traffic; and data about how many people are killed in confrontations with the police, and how are those cases handled; and how are we training our law enforcement to respect the communities that they’re serving; and how do we make sure we’ve got a diverse police force; and how do we look at new technologies like body cameras that may be helpful in this process; and how do we make sure that when something happens that may be an unjustified shoot, that people have confidence that the prosecutors are independent, and there’s a legitimacy to the process that they can trust.
That’s good not just for the community, that’s also good for the police department, so that they feel like they can get out from under a cloud if, in fact, the officer did the right thing. And if the officer did the wrong thing, that department should want to get rid of that officer, because they’re going to undermine trust for the good cops that are out there doing a good job.
So the point is that now our task is to work together to solve the problem, and not get caught up in either the cynicism that says this is never going to change because everybody is racist. That’s not a good solution. That’s not what the folks in Selma did. They had confidence that they could change things, and change people’s hearts and minds. So you’ve got to have the ability to assume the best in people, including law enforcement, and work with them.
And the flipside is, the larger community has to be able to say, you know what, when a community says systematically that it’s having some problems with its law enforcement, you’ve got to listen and pay attention, and engage constructively to build trust and accountability so that it gets better.
So often we get caught up in this and it becomes just a political football instead of us trying to solve the problem. And our goal should be to stop circumstances such as Ferguson or what happened in New York from happening again. That should be our number-one goal. And it is achievable, but we got to be constructive in going forward. (Applause.)
All right. I got one more question. Now it’s a woman’s turn. Men, all put down -- men got to put down their hands now. I’m looking around. It’s not going to be a guy. All right, we’ll call on this young lady right here. (Laughter.) Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Q I am also a native of Chicago.
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, well, I did not mean to call on three Chicagoans. (Laughter.) I guess this is where everybody in Chicago moves to because it’s too cold in Chicago. (Laughter.) Go ahead.
Q I am a senior majoring in psychology. One of my questions is, as you know, Chicago struggles with gun violence. So my question is, what organizations and programs are you guys designing to keep the youth off the streets and into better conditions? And how can we as a community help you guys execute those programs and designs and organizations?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I already mentioned My Brother’s Keeper, which is a major focus. Each community then is going to have its own -- this is an example of where you got to work with the police department effectively and build trust. What we know is things like community policing really work, where you're partnering with law enforcement; law enforcement gets to know young people when they're still in school before they're in trouble. People have confidence that law enforcement is there for them, not just in tamping down stuff, but in lifting people up. My Brother’s Keeper and other initiatives are going to make a big difference in giving young people an opportunity.
Now, you mentioned gun violence, and that’s probably the hardest issue to deal with. We have a long tradition of gun rights and gun ownership in this country. The Second Amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to mean that people have the right to bear arms. There are a lot of law-abiding, responsible gun owners who use it for protection or sport. They handle their weapons properly. There are traditions of families passing down from father to son or daughter hunting. And that's important. That's part of our culture. That's part of who we are.
But what we also have to recognize is, is that our homicide rates are so much higher than other industrialized countries. I mean by a like a mile. And most of that is attributable to the easy, ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.
Now, the courts and state legislatures -- and I’m sure this is true in South Carolina -- have greatly restricted the ability to put in place common-sense -- some common-sense gun safety laws like background checks. I personally believe that it is not violating anybody’s rights that if you want to purchase a gun, it should be at least your responsibility to get a background check so that we know you are not a violent felon, or that you don’t currently have a restraining order on you because you committed domestic abuse or -- right now, we don’t know a lot of that. It's just not available. And that doesn’t make sense to me. And I’ll be honest with you, I thought after what happened at Sandy Hook, that that would make us think about it.
The hardest day of my presidency, and I’ve had some hard days, but nothing compares to being with the parents of 20 6-year-old kids, beautiful little kids, and some heroic teachers and administrators in that school, just two-three days after they had just been gunned down in their own classroom. And you would have thought at that point, that has got to be enough of a motivator for us to want to do something about this. And we couldn’t get it done. I mean, there was just -- at least at the congressional level.
So what we’ve done is we have tried as much as we can administratively to implement background checks and to make sure that we’re working with those states and cities and jurisdictions that are interested and willing to partner with us to crack down on the legal use of firearms, particularly handguns.
But I’ll be honest with you. In the absence of more, what I would consider, heroic and courageous stances from our legislators both at the state level and the federal level, it is hard to reduce the easy availability of guns. And as long as you can go into some neighborhoods and it is easier for you to buy a firearm than it is for you to buy a book, there are neighborhoods where it's easier for you to buy a handgun and clips than it is for you to buy a fresh vegetable -- as long as that’s the case, we’re going to continue to see unnecessary violence.
But I’ll end by saying this. Despite those frustrations, despite the failure of Congress to act, despite the failure of too many state legislators to act -- in fact, in some places it goes the opposite direction, people just say well, we should have firearms in kindergarten and we should have machine guns in bars. You think I'm exaggerating -- I mean, you look at some of these laws that come up.
Despite those frustrations, I would say it is still within our control to reduce the incidence of handgun violence by making sure that our young people understand that that is not a sign of strength, that violence is not the answer for whatever frustrations they may have or conflicts they may have, and to work diligently with our young people and in our communities to try to put them on a positive path.
And the people who are going to lead that process are the young people who are here today. (Applause.) You are going to have more impact on the young people coming up behind you than anybody else. And the kind of example you set, and the willingness of all of you to get involved and engaged in a concrete way, to remake our world together, that’s what’s going to determine the future of America. And looking out at all of you, you’re what makes me optimistic.
Thank you very much, Benedict College. (Applause.)
What does it mean for a religion to be woven into American history?
The presence of Muslims in the early United States is well known to scholars -- historians have put their population in the tens of thousands -- yet when President Obama noted last month that "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," he was greeted with incredulous outrage.
that Islam's influence could be seen mainly in the role followers of Muhammad played in the slave trade and the Barbary Wars, while South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan wondered if the president's "Jakarta elementary education [ https://twitter.com/RepJeffDuncan/status/569128850044657664 ]" might be responsible for his view of the past.
But it's not up for argument that this majority Christian nation has a spiritual history much more diverse than usually supposed.
As Obama's critics have noted, there were, of course, no Muslims among the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both owned copies of the Quran, but they may have been as unaware of Muslims living in the young United States as David Barton and Jeff Duncan are today.
Muslims' presence here is affirmed in documents dated more than a century before religious liberty became the law of the land, as in a Virginia statute of 1682 which referred to "negroes, moores, molatoes, and others, born of and in heathenish, idollatrous, pagan, and Mahometan parentage and country" who "heretofore and hereafter may be purchased, procured, or otherwise obteigned, as slaves."
The number of Muslims brought to this predominantly Christian land would have equalled the populations of many religious groups in 18h century America. In fact, men and women with connections to Islam in the newly independent United States would have rivaled the memberships of Methodist or Roman Catholic churches, and far exceeded the number of Jews.
No one would challenge the notion that these other faiths "have been woven into the fabric of our country," so why has the presence of Muslims in early America been forgotten? In part because the role of religion in the origins of slavery has been replaced in popular memory with later distinctions made according to race.
Some of the original slavery laws actually were more concerned with the content of forced laborers' beliefs than with the color of their skin. From the perspective of Europeans of the time, the reason for this was clear: Belief could spread in a way that color could not.
Even in 1685, a Spanish law stated, "The introduction of Mohammedan slaves into America is forbidden on account of the danger which lies in their intercourse with the Indians." Religious difference was regarded as highly contagious, and thus dangerous.
In the English colonies of North America to which we more often trace our nation's history, slave owners originally assumed Christians should not be slaves. Christian servants might work for a predetermined period under slave-like indenture, but the duration of their servitude was limited by definition. Non¬-Christians, on the other hand, could be trapped in bondage for life.
This arrangement soon proved untenable, however. If slavery was defined in relation to belief, conversion would become a potential path to freedom. Only after a Virginia law of 1667 guaranteed that baptism would not "alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom," did English settlers declare that all enslaved men and women "brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, Moors, Mollattoes or Indians... shall be converted to the Christian faith."
The motivation for this was as much a matter of control as a genuine desire to spread the gospel. Praising the "beneficial effects of religious instruction" on the enslaved, one slaveholder later wrote, "those who have grown up under such instruction are more honest, truthful, moral... and devoted to their owners' interests than those who have not enjoyed the same advantages."
Given this history, it's no surprise that the place of Islam in the nation's past should make so many so uncomfortable. It was actively eradicated and replaced by the religious tradition with which the majority of Americans identify today.
Muslims were indeed here from the beginning, but the beliefs and practices they brought with them only rarely endured. Their experiences serve as a reminder that every faith woven into the fabric of our country has been made up of strands both light and dark.
Tracks to Freedom: The Inspiring Story of the Underground Railroad
Photograph by PAINTING, Alamy
A newly found journal of interviews with fugitive slaves gives insight into the secret network.
By Simon Worrall PUBLISHED February 18, 2015
The 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/movies/12-years-a-slave-holds-nothing-back-in-show-of-suffering.html?pagewanted=all ] brought the darkest era of America's history into the forefront of the national consciousness. Most slaves died in servitude. But a lucky—and courageous—few managed to escape via a network of safe houses and dedicated helpers that came to be known as the Underground Railroad. Long the stuff of mythology and local lore, the Underground Railroad has often been either overrated or undervalued.
Chitwetelu Ejiofor (at center) played Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South, in the 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave. Photograph by Regency Enterprises/Photos 12, Alamy
From his office on New York's Upper West Side, Foner explains how a chance find in the Columbia University archives led him on a journey of discovery, how one of George Washington's concerns after the War of Independence was to get his slaves back, and why—at a time when the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html ], has inflamed race relations in the U.S.—the Underground Railroad is something to celebrate.
Tell us about your discovery of Gay's "Register of Fugitives" and how that inspired you to tell this story.
I actually owe the discovery to a student of mine, who is doing a senior thesis here at Columbia on the abolitionist editor Sydney Howard Gay [ http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4078801/ ]. His papers are here, and she mentioned to me one day that there was this little document relating to fugitive slaves. It wasn't relevant to what she was doing, but she thought I might find it interesting. It was these two little notebooks called "Record of Fugitives."
Sydney Howard Gay was very connected to the Underground Railroad, and between 1855 and 1856 he kept a record of over 200 men, women, and children who passed through New York City. Being a journalist, he interviewed them, so the notebook is filled with fascinating information about who owned these slaves, where they came from, how they escaped, who helped them, how they got to New York, and where Gay sent them on their way to freedom in Canada.
Sydney Howard Gay is one of the main characters in the book. Give us a quick profile.
Sydney Howard Gay is little known today, but he was a fairly prominent abolitionist before the Civil War. He was born in Massachusetts and became an abolitionist around 1840-41, first as a speaker. Then he was appointed to edit a weekly newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard [ http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/national-anti-slavery-standard/ ], published in New York City, which represented William Lloyd Garrison and his group of abolitionists. New York was a hostile environment for abolitionists. It was a city very closely tied into the slave South economically. But Gay was a pretty courageous guy.
Later, during the Civil War, he became the managing editor of the New York Tribune [ http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/ ], which was a very important journalistic position at that time. His newspaper office also became what you might call a station on the Underground Railroad, where slaves would come through from farther south. Gay would hide them in local homes and then send them on their way out of New York City.
In the past the Underground Railroad was regarded as little more than local lore. Has your research uncovered a wider national significance to it?
The Underground Railroad has been portrayed incorrectly in both directions. In some literature, it's this vast, organized system with regular routes, like a real railroad with stations and times and secret passwords. On the other hand, some scholars denigrate it altogether. They say, "There was no such network—it was just the fugitives themselves getting out on their own initiative with no help."
When I started I had a somewhat skeptical view myself, because there is so much mythology about the Underground Railroad. In some towns in New England or upstate New York, it seems every other house has a little marker on it saying "This was a station on the Underground Railroad." [Laughs]
But as I studied these documents, I came to conclude that, yes, there had been such a network. It was incomplete. It was not highly organized. It was basically local groups that communicated with each other. There weren't a vast number of people involved. In New York City at any one time there were never more than a dozen people actively working to help slaves. Many others were sympathetic but weren't that involved. So one shouldn't exaggerate it. But it did exist, and it helped a considerable number of fugitives to get out of slavery.
Many people, including myself, assumed the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad. How did it get its name?
Nobody quite knows how it got its name, or when the name was used for the first time. There were people helping fugitives long before the term came into existence. But certainly by the 1840s, it was a widely accepted metaphor for a secret set of networks assisting fugitives. But it was not an actual physical railroad. Slaves escaped by all sorts of modes. Some escaped on foot; some escaped in horse-drawn carriages, on boats, or on actual trains. There were trains running between the upper South [Virginia or Maryland] and the North, and if you could get "free papers" from someone, you could get on a train and get up to the North. But the term "Underground Railroad" stuck as a metaphor.
The movie 12 Years a Slave brought to life one aspect of this story. Tell us about the slave catchers and a term that has gained an ominous new relevance today: rendition.
One thing about that movie is that it's the story of a free man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. That happened quite frequently. In New York City there were gangs that preyed upon black people, particularly children. They would just nab them, put them on a boat, and send them to the South to be sold into slavery.
The original organization that founded the Underground Railroad was the New York Vigilance Committee. It was basically a black organization founded in the 1830s to try and stop this kidnapping epidemic. Then they expanded to help fugitives coming from the South through the city.
Rendition just means "capturing and returning a fugitive slave," sometimes without any legal process at all. They just grabbed them and took them back. And the rendition of fugitive slaves became a very common thing, especially in the 1850s after the federal government passed the Fugitive Slave Acts [ http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fugitive-slave-acts ], which greatly strengthened the legal mechanisms for doing this.
Harriet Tubman, a slave in Maryland who escaped and subsequently led some 70 fugitives out of the state to freedom, has been called the "Moses of her people." Photograph by Corbis
Harriet Tubman was a slave in Maryland who escaped around 1849. Unlike most people who escaped, she went back several times during the 1850s. It's estimated that she led about 70 or so slaves to freedom from Maryland. If you were caught helping a fugitive slave in the South, the punishments were draconian. People were sentenced to 30 or 40 years in jail. So anybody doing this in the South was taking a tremendous risk. But she managed to do it. She passes through New York City twice, in 1855 and 1856, and she appears in this document, the "Record of Fugitives."
Sydney Howard Gay calls her Captain Harriet Tubman. I found that an interesting title. It suggests that he knew her before this or knew who she was. "Captain" wasn't a term normally applied to women at that time—it's a military rank—but her reputation as someone of great courage had already preceded her. So he writes in his book "Captain Harriet Tubman appeared with 4 fugitive slaves."
My wife's ancestors were Wilmington Quakers who actually hid fugitive slaves. How important was Delaware on the Underground Railroad?
In this sketch from the mid-1700s, slaves flee from Maryland to Delaware. Thanks to the Underground Railroad, thousands of fugitives were able to escape bondage in slave-holding states. Photograph by Universal History Archive, Getty
Delaware was very important. It's a very small place, as you well know. But it was on the way between the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where slavery was concentrated, and the free soil of Pennsylvania. Delaware itself had almost no slaves. By 1860 there were only 1,800 slaves in Delaware, so it's mostly people passing through from Maryland, Virginia, or the District of Columbia.
Wilmington was an odd place. It was in a slave state, yet it's only five or six miles from the Pennsylvania border, and it was one of the very few states where there was an active anti-slavery movement involving Quakers. One Quaker, a Wilmington businessman named Thomas Garrett, claimed to have assisted 3,000 fugitives slaves over the course of the 30 or so years before the Civil War. The Quakers were well known for their anti-slavery sentiment, and slaves knew this. One of the fugitives, who is mentioned in Gay's records, tells him, "When I got to Pennsylvania, I knocked on a door and said, 'Send me to a Quaker. I don't care who, just send me to a Quaker.'"
It's rather disconcerting to discover that one of George Washington's main concerns after the War of Independence was to get his slaves back. Tell us about the British dimension to this story.
In 1783, when the war was over, the British were evacuating Charleston, [South Carolina, and] Savannah [Georgia [ http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/slavery-revolutionary-georgia ]] and took a lot of slaves with them. Washington was up here in New York, negotiating with General Clinton, the British commander. Thousands of slaves had fled to New York City. The British were not abolitionist at that time. Slavery was thriving in the British Empire. But nonetheless Clinton said, "We must keep our word. We have promised these people freedom."
Washington said, "We want our slaves back. Indeed, I wish you would keep a lookout for a couple of my slaves who I think are here." It's a sign of the contradiction built into American history at the outset—that you have a war for liberty, yet it's being conducted by slave owners. That contradiction is there right from the start of our republic.
The question of fugitive slaves was one of the underlying irritants that led to the Civil War. Tell us about the Fugitive Slave Acts.
First of all, the right of the South to get their fugitives back is in the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, on this and many other points, the Constitution is rather vague. It doesn't say who's supposed to capture them or whose responsibility it is. In 1850, because previous laws had not succeeded in stopping the escapes of slaves, this fugitive slave law, which was very draconian, was passed. This made it a federal responsibility for the first time. The federal government would send marshalls into northern places looking for fugitives. It set up a new category of officials called federal commissioners, who would hear these cases. Even the Army could be used to take people back to slavery. It was also retroactive. You could have lived in the North for 30 years and still be grabbed under this new law.
This became a big irritant between the North and South. We tend to think of the South before the Civil War as a bastion of state's rights. But in fact the South wanted this law, which overrode all the rights of the northern states and was a very vigorous exercise of national power in defense of slavery. In the North, there were instances of armed resistance. In Pennsylvania, a slave owner was killed by a mob trying to protect fugitive slaves. In Boston, a mob, mostly of free blacks, entered a courthouse where a fugitive slave was being held, grabbed him, took him out, and sent him off to Canada. The same thing happened in Syracuse [New York].
And these kinds of things exacerbated the sectional conflicts. Southerners began to say, "How can we trust the North, if they willingly violate federal law and constitutional provisions when it comes to fugitive slaves?" Northerners said, "This just shows how slavery is undermining the liberty of all people, not just blacks."
How has writing this book changed your view of early American history?
I've taught this period for a long time. [Laughs] So I don't know if my view has changed completely. But it certainly changed my view of the Underground Railroad, which, as I said, I'd been pretty skeptical about. Nobody knows the exact numbers because this was in secret. But my estimate is that about a thousand slaves per year managed to escape, or 30,000 in the period from 1830 to the Civil War. There were four million slaves in 1860, so this is just a drop in the bucket. It didn't destroy the institution of slavery.
But I think it is a significant accomplishment. I find the story inspiring. We've had in this country lately a lot of racial tension because of incidences that have occurred with the police, like in Ferguson, Missouri. Here's an example of black and white people working together in an interracial movement in a just cause. And I think we should be proud of it.
Catalog Number: OrHi 51017 Date: c. 1922 Era: (1890-1930) Emergence of Modern America / Economic Growth & Expansion Type: photograph Author: Unknown Themes: Social Relations Credits: Oregon Historical Society [ http://www.ohs.org/ , http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/ ]
Written by Dane Bevan
This image shows a photograph from the early 1920s, probably in Portland, in which robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan members share a stage with members of the Royal Riders of the Red Robe, a Klan auxiliary for foreign-born white Protestants. A large banner reading “Jesus Saves” occupies a prominent position on the wall at the rear of the stage and testifies to the strong role that Protestantism played in the KKK philosophy of “100 percent Americanism [ http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/OHP-Glossary-100-Percent-Americanism.cfm ].”
United States involvement in World War I signaled the end of the Progressive era of American politics, while the end of the war ushered in a new conservativism in the nation. Americans—especially those of the middle class—felt increasingly threatened by both foreign and domestic forces that were beyond their control. Fears of communism and unchecked immigration spurred the formation of patriotic and nativist groups throughout the country during the post-war period. In response to the latter, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 which severely restricted the number of immigrants who could enter the country. Within the U.S., the migration of Southern blacks to the industrialized cities of the North was viewed as an economic and racial threat by the North’s predominantly white labor base. Catholics and Jews were still viewed as “foreign” religions that threatened the fabric of American life. Capitalizing upon these fears, the founder of the Second Ku Klux Klan, William Joseph Simmons, created a nation-wide organization that both perpetuated and profited from this new conservatism.
The Klan philosophy of “100 percent Americanism” rested primarily on three attributes: belief in a philosophy of white supremacy; adherence to Protestant or “American” Christianity; and the superiority of native-born Americans. Given Oregon’s long history of racial exclusion and the fact that almost 90 percent of the state’s population in the early 1920s was native-born, white, and protestant, Klan organizers had little trouble enrolling new members. These kleagles played to the economic, religious, and political concerns of “ordinary” middle-class citizens by stressing the threats posed by immigrant labor, “foreign” religions, and communism. In addition, the KKK’s militaristic culture enhanced its appeal among members of other organizations structured along strict hierarchical and ideological lines. Recognizing this fact, the Klan organizers directed their initial recruiting efforts at local law enforcement officials, protestant clergy, and members of fraternal groups such as the Masons and the Elks.
To enhance the strength and influence of their organization, the KKK established auxiliary groups like the Royal Riders of the Red Robe for white Protestants born outside the United States and the Ladies of the Invisible Empire for women. Both of these affiliates helped support what in the early 1920s became one of the strongest state Klans in the country.
Further Reading:
Saalfeld, Lawrence J. Forces of Prejudice in Oregon, 1920-1925. Portland, Ore.: 1984.
Horowitz, David. Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Carbondale, Ill.: 1999.
Toy, Eckard Vance. The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon: Its Character and Program. M.A. Thesis, University of Oregon: 1959.
Great Migration Shortened Lives of Blacks Who Fled Jim Crow South
By Errin Whack First published February 17th 2015, 2:52 pm
The move North for millions of African-Americans during the Great Migration brought greater economic and educational opportunities — but also new stresses and big city vices that actually shortened their lives, according to a new study.
Published this month in the American Economic Review, the study [ https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.20120642 ] found that mortality rates increased at 40 percent for black men and 50 percent for black women who fled the dangers and discrimination of the Jim Crow South in search of better lives. Common causes of death for the migrants included cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and cirrhosis — all linked to bad habits like smoking and drinking.
The study's findings contradict a common assumption among economists that more education and wealth automatically benefit one's health, said Duke University economist and demographer Seth Sanders.
"We thought what we would find was that migration north extended life and made the African-American population healthier," said Sanders one of the study's co-authors. "We actually found exactly the opposite. Urban life is stressful. Being away from your roots is probably stressful."
Roughly six million African-Americans left the Deep South from approximately 1910's to 1970's — about half of black America at that time. They left traditional farm economies in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, boarding trains for destinations like New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago — industrial centers very different from the places they left behind.
African American women at work manufacturing spiral puttees at plant of Alexander Propper & Company, New York City.
The study found that if an African-American man lived to age 65 the chances that he would make it to age 70 if he remained in the South were 82.5 percent; if he migrated to the North the chance of surviving to age 70 dropped to 75 percent.
For an African-American woman who lived to age 65, the chances that she would make it to age 70 if she remained in the South were 90 percent; if she migrated to the North, the chance of surviving to age 70 dropped to 85 percent.
With better paying jobs came more disposable income and the habits that accompanied having more money. Drinking and smoking were aspirational activities for all Americans then — and whites migrating to cities from the Great Plains during the same time period also smoked and drank more.
But added to the difficulties already present in adjusting to city living, blacks faced unique challenges that added to their stress — the racism of the North, which included being forced to live in overcrowded neighborhoods, not being allowed to join unions, and being underpaid for the work they were doing. Such circumstances only gave them another reason to find ways to cope, said Isabel Wilkerson, author of "THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Warmth-Other-Suns-Migration/dp/0679763880 ]."
"They were fleeing the violence of the caste system in the South, only to be met with challenges and obstacles in the North," Wilkerson explained. "They were searching for ways to manage in a world that had not welcomed them… where they were met with hostility upon their arrival. I would not find it surprising that their health would suffer as a result."
UNITED STATES - CIRCA 1935: African American Resident of Plain City, Ohio smoking a pipe outside of a clothing store.
And rather than simply being exposed to these environments, African-Americans were relegated to them. Discrimination and violence prevented many from moving away from the slums that operated as vice districts that would've been in conflict with a Southern upbringing often heavily rooted in faith and morality.
"There was a general moral concern having to do with the lack of godliness in their experiences in the big city," Wilkerson explained. "There was a fear of what was going to happen to people … without their family or community connections that were the moderating force in their lives. (The vice districts) were the only place they were permitted to live… all of the things that would not have been permissible in other neighborhoods were allowed. And when they sought to leave, they were met with resistance."
Still, Wilkerson said, the trade-off would have been worth it for people whose daily survival far outweighed the notion of making it to old age.
"This is the price that they paid for the freedom that they sought," Wilkerson said. "They were moving to an unknown land with challenges they could not have imagined. Yet, in spite of the risks they had to take, for them, at that time, their actions showed that it was worth the risk in order to live freer than they were at home."
Sanders points out that the study's findings are not just lessons about the Great Migration, but are a microcosm of what happens to any group of people moving from rural poverty into the city, from low-skilled to higher-skilled, industrial, diverse economies.
"To understand the Great Migration will help you understand what's going on in the world today," said Sanders, who cited present-day migrations in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. "Nothing is universally true. You can't say migration was good or bad. To ask, 'Was it worth it or not?' is kind of an impossible task."
This Supreme Court Decision Could Encourage One Of The Worst Forms Of Racism Across the street from a federal housing project built for black residents of Detroit in 1942. 02/17/2015 Updated: 02/18/2015 [...] As ProPublica noted [ http://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-courts-latest-race-case-housing-discrimination ], a ruling against disparate impact claims this year would give the Roberts Court a dubious hat trick: It would have effectively undermined the three most substantial civil rights laws of the 1960s -- the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. [...] [much more at/via] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/17/supreme-court-housing-discrimination_n_6572862.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
Christian College Student Attacked With Apple for Questioning Treatment of Gays
A note on a student bulletin board at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., Feb. 24, 2015.
The apple thrower then posted a defense of his actions on a campus wall
Elizabeth Dias Feb. 25, 2015
After a student at a prominent evangelical college questioned his school’s stance against homosexuality in an all-school forum on Monday, another student allegedly threw an apple at him “as a warning against insulting the Spirit of grace.”
The incident, which college administrators are now addressing, took place on Monday at Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater outside Chicago, during the campus’ traditional “Town Hall Chapel,” a campuswide question and answer session where the college president, currently Philip Ryken, takes questions from the student body. Wheaton holds marriage to be between one man and one woman, and requires students and faculty to uphold that sexual ethic. Christian colleges such as Wheaton have been at the center of the evangelical fight [ http://time.com/3668781/inside-the-evangelical-fight-over-gay-marriage/ ] over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) acceptance, especially as younger generations grow increasingly more accepting on issues such as same-sex marriage.
The most recent conflict began when Philip Fillion, a class of 2015 organ performance major and married heterosexual, asked Ryken a question about the theological consistency of Wheaton’s position against homosexuality. He posted his question in full in a public note on his Facebook page:
“All students, via the Community Covenant, and all faculty, via the Statement of Faith, are required to affirm a sexual ethic that denies everyone except celibates and married straight people a place in the kingdom of God. This sexual ethic is not at all universal and depends on a reading of scripture that is incredibly narrow and ignores history, culture, and science. The Statement of Faith and the Community Covenant also lack any language about the sacraments of the Christian church. Why is it the case that our college, in documents we all must agree to or be expelled, insists on formally condemning and denying equality to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, on spurious theological grounds, yet completely leaves behind baptism and Eucharist, which Jesus Christ himself instituted to grow and strengthen the Christian community?”
As he returned to his seat, the college tells TIME, another student sitting nearby threw the apple at him, and missed. Fillion tells TIME it hit him on his left shoulder partly through his question. “There was no response when the fruit was thrown. No boos, no gasp,” he says. “A student was in line after me and when it was his turn to ask a question, he began his time at the microphone by calling out whoever had thrown the fruit, remarking that such behavior was inappropriate and disrespectful. There was restrained applause for this.”
“President Ryken did not see the incident and did not fully understand what happened until after chapel ended,” Wheaton College told TIME in a statement.
At first, the apple was the end of the story, though some students were bothered. Justin Massey, a senior political science major and a co-founder of the campus’ LGBT student group Refuge, was disturbed that the incident did not garner more serious attention. “I saw peers exert more effort into rationalizing the offense rather than demonstrating support to the LGBT community whose experiences were disrespected,” Massey wrote on his blog [ https://thefaithfulwithin.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/rationalizing-injustice/ ]. “From three separate individuals I have heard that the disruptive student simply felt ‘the question was just too long,’ ‘the tone of the inquiring student appeared rude,’ and even ‘it was simply a joke gone wrong.’ Each of these answers has one thing in common: they take responsibility off of the offending individual in an attempt to absolve this student of displaying any prejudice against a minority group.”
But the situation escalated dramatically when a student claiming to be the apple-thrower then posted a letter on the campus’ public bulletin board, the “Forum Wall,” a space traditionally designated for student opinions, accepting responsibility for and defending his actions, Wheaton confirms. “Dear Enemy,” the note began. “In regards to ‘casting a stone,’ you would be mistaken to think that I threw the apple out of hatred. I have strong aim and could hit a head at fifteen meters if I wanted to. No, I threw it purposefully as a warning against insulting the Spirit of grace. Because Truth itself was maligned. For the destruction of those who ‘have the form of godliness but deny its power’ was written about long ago. And in regards to the story of the adulteress, have you not read what Jesus told the woman, ‘God now and leave your life of sin.’ ? So neither do I condemn you, but do fear God and live in righteousness! Do not choose destruction.” Signed: “Not ashamed of Truth, Roland Hesse.”
Late Tuesday night, Massey wrote a letter to Ryken and other campus leaders, alerting them of the Forum Wall letter and arguing that the incident was more than just a theological dispute. “Upon reading this letter I feel threatened and unsafe, and I know that I am not the only student who feels this way,” Massey, who is openly gay, wrote. “This action of throwing an item at another student is violent in nature and his sentiments reflected in the Forum Wall post are threatening….My peers and I strongly feel that prompt discussion, discipline, and communication with the student body must take place to explicitly call out these actions and properly deal with this situation.”
Massey and other students, LGBT and allied, met with campus officials Wednesday morning to discuss the situation. “The religious tone and justification that he voiced, that was really frightening to us,” Massey says. “That is why we are asking for the College to specifically recognize that this incident targeted a minority group of people, that this wasn’t just a theological disagreement—this was LGBT students feeling the weight of the actions.”
Ryken briefly addressed the situation to the student body in Wednesday’s all-school chapel. The incident comes the same week as another Wheaton student was arrested for allegedly secretly filming a female Wheaton student in her shower [ http://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/7/71/392957/wheaton-college-student-charged-videotaping-student-shower ] since October 2014. “He asked our community to pray for leaders from Student Development and the Chaplain’s Office who hold students accountable and work with them for repentance, healing, and reconciliation,” Wheaton’s statement to TIME continues. “Wheaton College unequivocally condemns acts of disrespect, aggression and intimidation. While expressions of disagreement are to be expected in a liberal arts learning environment, our expectation is that members of our Christian community express disagreement and debate important issues with courtesy, respect, and love for God and each other—values we express in our Community Covenant [ http://www.wheaton.edu/About-Wheaton/Community-Covenant ]. This is especially important when we discuss sensitive and challenging topics, or when our convictions are disputed.”
Wheaton added that “students who violate community standards are held accountable for their actions” but that “federal privacy laws prevents the College from commenting extensively on disciplinary matters.”
However, Massey said that he learned the student has been disciplined.
“It has been confirmed to me that as of this afternoon, the offending student will no longer be on campus, and if he is on campus, LGBT students that feel threatened will be immediately notified,” Massey says. “I’m incredibly impressed at how the administration is responding—I’m very pleased to know they are taking this seriously.”
As Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.”
Why people who live in the Western Hemisphere -- which includes everyone living in the United States -- would need a special-interest group wasn't addressed by Butt.
The comment was first flagged by alternative weekly newspaper Nashville Scene [id.].
Butt later deleted her comment and replaced it with, “We need groups that will stand for Christians and our Western culture. We don’t have groups dedicated to speaking on our behalf.”
Many criticized Butt for using the acronym NAAWP, which various white supremacy groups have used in the past to mean the National Association for the Advancement of White People. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke founded an organization [ http://archive.adl.org/special_reports/duke_own_words/print.html ] with that name.
“That was an acronym that at that morning, I simply made up to say, ‘National Association for the Advancement of Western Peoples,'" Butt said. "I had no idea that had ever been used for that before. So that’s something that just came out of nowhere, actually."
Butt's comments sparked a backlash from CAIR as well as the Tennessee House Black Caucus.
Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national communications director, told The Huffington Post they showcase “the overall level of ... bigotry” acceptable within the Republican Party.
“We’ve unfortunately had too many Republican Party leaders and lawmakers make such statements,” he said. “It’s really time that they address this issue as a party instead of just pretending that Islamophobia doesn’t exist within their ranks.”
He added that Butt's stated goal of advocating for “Western peoples” is not much better than advocating for “white people.”
“You almost end up with the same result even if you believe that explanation,” he said.
House Speaker Beth Harwell said she would not remove Butt from her position.
“I think Sheila’s intentions were good, and I think she was misunderstood,” Harwell said.
Glen Casada, chairman of the state House Republican Caucus, also came to the defense of Butt. He released a statement Thursday saying CAIR should focus its attention elsewhere.
“Instead of using their energy attacking conservatives in Tennessee, CAIR should instead refocus their efforts on stopping the spread of radical extremists in their own religion in the United States and across the world,” he said. “I call on my colleagues in the General Assembly to join me in defending western values and culture against radical Islam.”
Republicans Propose Declaring Idaho A 'Christian State'
This Friday, Dec. 11, 2009 shows the Idaho statehouse in Boise, Idaho. State lawmakers are finally scheduled to return to their official government home Monday, Jan. 11, 2010 in the Capitol building after 2 1/2 years and about $120 million in renovations and expansion work. (AP Photo/Charlie Litchfield)
By Laura Zuckerman Posted: 02/24/2015 6:29 pm EST Updated: 02/24/2015 7:59 pm EST
SALMON, Idaho, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Members of a county Republican Party in Idaho are to take up a measure on Tuesday evening that would declare the state a Christian one to bolster what the proposal calls the "Judeo-Christian bedrock of the founding of the United States."
The resolution to be voted on by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee is non-binding, meaning it does not have the effect of laws or rules.
The proposal seeks that Idaho be "formally and specifically declared a Christian state," guided by a Judeo-Christian faith reflected in the U.S. Declaration of Independence where all authority and power is attributed to God, the resolution reads.
The measure argues that the Christian faith is under "strident attack" in the United States, and cites as evidence the absence of Christian traditions and symbols in public institutions such as schools.
The issue has sparked debate within the Republican stronghold of northern Idaho, once known for harboring leaders of the so-called Christian identity or white supremacist movement such as the late Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler.
Supporters say the measure echoes the Christian principles espoused by early U.S. presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and that it has added significance at a time when Christians are subject to persecution in countries such as Syria where it is not the dominant religion.
"We're a Christian community in a Christian state and the Republican Party is a Christian Party," said Jeff Tyler, a member of the committee and backer of the draft resolution.
"It's important that Christians stand up and be unashamed to say they're Christians."
Other committee members said they opposed the proposal, but that it placed them in a difficult position because if they voted against it they risked being unjustly labeled as anti-Christian.
Bjorn Handeen, a committee member who described himself as a Republican with libertarian leanings, said he is opposed to any document that puts the government in charge of defining Christianity.
He said the resolution was pushed by a small group within the committee that is bent on creating division among its about 70 members.
"Ultimately, I'm not in favor of dividing us by religion; I'm in favor of uniting us by freedom," Handeen said.
If approved, the resolution would be submitted to the state Republican Party for a vote by its members.
Idaho has long been a Republican bastion, with party members holding the majority of state offices.
(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Mohammad Zargham)
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." -- John Adams
By Jeff Schweitzer Scientist and former White House Senior Policy Analyst; Ph.D. in marine biology/neurophysiology Posted: 02/26/2015 12:49 pm EST Updated: 02/26/2015 4:59 pm EST
As we witness yet again the brutal and bloody consequences of religious intolerance in the form of ISIS, we have a majority of Republicans pining for a Christian America [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/25/republicans-christian-america_n_6754032.html ]. Proponents of converting the United States into a theocracy do not see the terrible parallel between religious excess in the Middle East and here at home, but they would not because blindness to reason is the inevitable consequence of religious zealotry.
Conservatives who so proudly tout their fealty to the Constitution want to trash our founding document by violating the First Amendment in hopes of establishing Christianity as the nation's religion. This is precisely what the Constitution prohibits:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Back to the Beginning
How terribly ironic that the louder Christians protest against the excesses of Islam, the more they agitate for Christian excess. We really need to stop this ridiculous argument about being a Christian nation. If there should be any doubt, let us listen to the founding fathers themselves. This from Thomas Jefferson [ http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/53/Letter_from_Thomas_Jefferson_to_John_Adams_1.html ] in an April 11, 1823, letter to John Adams:
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. ... But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding....
These are not the words of a man who wishes to establish a Christian theocracy. Jefferson promoted tolerance above all and said earlier that his statute for religious freedom in Virginia [ http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions45.html ] was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination." He specifically wished to avoid the dominance of a single religion.
Let us be perfectly clear: We are not now, nor have we ever been, a Christian nation. Our founding fathers explicitly and clearly excluded any reference to "God" or "the Almighty" or any euphemism for a higher power in the Constitution. Not one time is the word "god" mentioned in our founding document. Not one time.
The facts of our history are easy enough to verify. Anybody who ignorantly insists that our nation is founded on Christian ideals need only look at the four most important documents from our early history -- the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers and the Constitution -- to disprove that ridiculous religious bias. All four documents unambiguously prove our secular origins.
Declaration of Independence (1776)
The most important assertion in this document is that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Note that the power of government is derived not from any god but from the people. No appeal is made in this document to a god for authority of any kind. In no case are any powers given to religion in the affairs of man.
Remember, too, that this document was not written to form or found a government but was stating intent in a way that was meant to appeal to an audience with European sensibilities. Only four times is there any reference at all to higher powers -- "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," "Supreme Judge of the world," "their Creator," and "divine Providence" -- and in all four cases the references to a higher power appeal to the idea of inherent human dignity, never implying a role for a god in government.
Articles of Confederation (1777)
Throughout the entire document, in all 13 articles, the only reference to anything remotely relating to a god is a term used one time, "Great Governor of the World," and even then only in the context of general introduction, like "Ladies and gentlemen, members of the court...." Unlike the Declaration of Independence, this document did indeed seek to create a type of government in the form of a confederation of independent states. The authors gave no power or authority to religion. And this document is our first glimpse into the separation of church and state, because just as the Articles of Confederation give no authority to religion in civil matters, so too does the document deny any authority of government in matters of faith.
U.S. Constitution (1787)
This one is easy, because the Constitution of the United States of America makes zero reference to a god or Christianity.
The only reference to religion, found in Article VI, is a negative one: "[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." And of course we have the First Amendment, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Federalist Papers (1787-88)
While Thomas Jefferson was the genius behind the Declaration of Independence, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (publishing under the pseudonym "Publius") were the brains providing the intellectual foundation of our Constitution. And what brilliance they brought to the task. The first time I picked up the Federalist Papers, I intended to scan the book briefly and then move on to more interesting pursuits. But I could not put it down; the book reads like an intriguing mystery novel with an intricate plot and complex characters acting on every human emotion. There is no better way to get into the minds of our founding fathers and understand their original intent than by reading this collection of amazing essays.
As with the Constitution, at no time is a god ever mentioned in the Federalist Papers. At no time is Christianity ever mentioned. Religion is only discussed in the context of keeping matters of faith separate from concerns of governance, and of keeping religion free from government interference.
The founding fathers could not be clearer on this point: God has no role in government; Christianity has no role in government. They make this point explicitly, repeatedly, in multiple founding documents. We are not a Christian nation.
"In God We Trust"
Our national obsession with God in politics is actually a recent phenomenon and would seem completely alien to any of our founders. "In God We Trust" was first placed on United States coins in 1861, during the Civil War. (More about that in a bit.) Teddy Roosevelt [ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9406E2D8103EE033A25757C1A9679D946697D6CF ( http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1907/11/14/106767538.html?pageNumber=1 / http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1907/11/14/106767538.html?pageNumber=2 )] tried to remove the words from our money in 1907 but was shouted down. Only in 1956 was that expression adopted as the national motto by the 84th Congress. The clause "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance was inserted only in 1954, when President Eisenhower [ http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/88541 ] signed legislation to recognize "the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty." But conservatives, ignorant of our history, or willfully ignoring it, wish us to believe that the pledge always referenced God. Here is Sarah Palin's take [id.], defending the "under God" clause: "If the pledge was good enough for the founding fathers, its [sic] good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance." One wonders if she thinks the founders were alive in 1954. I guess if Noah could live to be nearly 800 years old....
That we are a secular nation was obvious to past generations, so much so that in the mid-1800s several groups formed to rectify what they considered a mistake of our forefathers in founding our country on principles of reason rather than faith. Perhaps the most prominent was the National Reform Association, established in 1863 for the purpose of amending the preamble to the Constitution to acknowledge God and Jesus Christ as the sources of all government power, because the original document does not.
The National Reform Association [ http://americanvision.org/3026/the-national-reform-association/ ] believed that the Civil War was evidence that God was punishing the country for their failure to put God into the Constitution (nothing to do with slavery, of course). Also, note that this apparent knowledge of God's mind is reminiscent of Pat Robertson's claims [ http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/01/13/haiti.pat.robertson/ ] about God's wrath in Haiti, Florida and anywhere else he believes the devil has taken hold. Anyway, in their 1864 convention the National Reform Association agreed on a preamble that would replace "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." with "Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the governor among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government...."
They presented their suggestion to President Lincoln, who avoided it like a dirty diaper. The Congress also dodged the idea but threw the group a bone by agreeing to put "In God We Trust" on our currency, in an act of pure political pandering. So "In God We Trust" was first placed on United States coins in 1861 during the Civil War. From the Treasury [ http://www.treasury.gov/about/education/pages/in-god-we-trust.aspx ] we also find out:
The use of IN GOD WE TRUST has not been uninterrupted. The motto disappeared from the five-cent coin in 1883, and did not reappear until production of the Jefferson nickel began in 1938. Since 1938, all United States coins bear the inscription. Later, the motto was found missing from the new design of the double-eagle gold coin and the eagle gold coin shortly after they appeared in 1907. In response to a general demand, Congress ordered it restored, and the Act of May 18, 1908, made it mandatory on all coins upon which it had previously appeared. IN GOD WE TRUST was not mandatory on the one-cent coin and five-cent coin. It could be placed on them by the Secretary or the Mint Director with the Secretary's approval.
The motto has been in continuous use on the one-cent coin since 1909, and on the ten-cent coin since 1916. It also has appeared on all gold coins and silver dollar coins, half-dollar coins, and quarter-dollar coins struck since July 1, 1908.
For much of our existence, the United States never included God in its motto, on its currency, or in any document creating the Republic. We were born a secular nation and must remain one to sustain our future, unless we want to go the way of ISIS.
Our founding fathers understood well the extraordinary danger of mixing religion and politics; we forget that lesson at our great peril. If we forget, just glance over to the Middle East. I tremble in fear for my country when the majority of conservatives believe we are a Christian nation; that frightening majority has forgotten our history, ignored our founding principles and abandoned our most cherished ideal of separating church and state. In mixing religion and politics, the religious right subverts both. And the world suffers.
This inspirational documentary is about a band of courageous civil rights activists calling themselves the Freedom Riders. Gaining impressive access to influential figures on both sides of the issue, it chronicles a chapter of American history that stands as an astonishing testament to the accomplishment of youth and what can result from the incredible combination of personal conviction and the courage to organize against all odds
John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician, and civil rights leader. He is the U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district, serving since 1987, and is the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. The district includes the northern three-quarters of Atlanta.
Lewis is the only living "Big Six" leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, having been the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), playing a key role in the struggle to end legalized racial discrimination and segregation. A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis is a member of the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives and has served in the Whip organization since shortly after his first election to the U.S. Congress.
He is Senior Chief Deputy Whip, leading an organization of chief deputy whips and serves as the primary assistant to the Democratic Whip. He has held this position since 1991.
By 1963, he was recognized as one of the "Big Six" leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, along with Whitney Young, A. Phillip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins. In that year, Lewis helped plan the historic March on Washington in August 1963, the occasion of Dr. King's celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech. Currently, he is the last remaining speaker from the march. Lewis represented SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and at 23 was the youngest speaker that day.[4]
In 1964, Lewis coordinated SNCC's efforts for "Mississippi Freedom Summer," a campaign to register black voters across the South. The Freedom Summer was an attempt to expose college students from around the country to the perils of African-American life in the South. Lewis traveled the country encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people in Mississippi, the most recalcitrant state in the union, to register and vote. Lewis became nationally known during his prominent role in the Selma to Montgomery marches. On March 7, 1965 – a day that would become known as "Bloody Sunday" – Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with night sticks. Lewis's skull was fractured, but he escaped across the bridge, to a church in Selma. Before he could be taken to the hospital, John Lewis appeared before the television cameras calling on President Johnson to intervene in Alabama. On his head, Lewis bears scars that are still visible today.
Historian Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence."
Lewis opposed the U.S. waging of the 1991 Gulf War, NAFTA, and the 2000 trade agreement with China that passed the House. Lewis opposed the Clinton administration on NAFTA and welfare reform.[24] After welfare reform passed, Lewis was described as outraged; he said, "Where is the sense of decency? What does it profit a great nation to conquer the world, only to lose its soul?"[30] In 1994, when Clinton was considering invading Haiti, Lewis, in contrast to the Congressional Black Caucus as a whole, opposed armed intervention.[31] When Clinton did send troops to Haiti, Lewis called for supporting the troops and called the intervention a "mission of peace".[32] In 1998, when Clinton was considering a military strike against Iraq, Lewis said he would back the president if American forces were ordered into action.[33] In 2001, three days after the September 11 attacks, Lewis voted to give Bush authority to retaliate in a vote that was 420–1; Lewis called it probably one of his toughest votes.[26] In 2002, he sponsored the Peace Tax Fund bill, a conscientious objection to military taxation initiative that had been reintroduced yearly since 1972.[34] Lewis was a "fierce partisan critic of President Bush" and the Iraq war.[11] The Associated Press said he was "the first major House figure to suggest impeaching George W. Bush," arguing that the president "deliberately, systematically violated the law" in authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps without a warrant. Lewis said, "He is not King, he is president."
The First Family traveled to Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, and to celebrate the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“They came with horses,” Amelia Boynton Robinson recalled. “They came with nightsticks.”
On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers blocked civil rights demonstrators who had just crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Boynton Robinson, then a middle-aged black woman, was tear-gassed and beaten and slumped unconscious on the side of the road. The troopers attacked the marchers in events that became known as "Bloody Sunday."
Learn more about the woman now called “Queen Mother” and join us for a look back at the historical Civil Rights Movement and a look ahead at the modern movement 50 years after Selma at latimes.com/selma.
Photographs courtesy of:
James “Spider” Martin Photographic Archive, UT Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History
This short documentary explores how the murder of a white minister in Selma, Ala., helped catalyze the civil rights movement. Video by Andrew Beck Grace on March 6, 2015.
By ANDREW BECK GRACE MARCH 6, 2015
When many of us think about the civil rights movement, we remember the courage of the black protesters who risked their lives and livelihoods to push for equal rights. But obscured in this history is the fact that it took the murder of a white clergyman to trigger the national outrage about rights abuses in the South that led to real change.
At the heart of this story is the death of the Rev. James Reeb, who was in Selma, Ala., for protests in March 1965. In this Op-Doc video, one of the other white clergymen with him, the Rev. Clark Olsen, tells how they were attacked by a group of white men, killing Mr. Reeb. The assault became national news.
Now retired in Asheville, N.C., Mr. Olsen says that publicly sharing these events helps him deal with his guilt that the country seemed to care more about the attack he experienced than the plight of Southern blacks at the time.
Mr. Olsen said he learned from an independent researcher that President Johnson received 57 phone calls expressing concern for Mr. Reeb’s ordeal (records confirm there were at least 50). In contrast, the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black man and the original inspiration for the march that became Bloody Sunday, received little national attention.
When Johnson gave his historic speech advocating for passage of the Voting Rights Bill, he invoked the death of the white minister, James Reeb, as opposed to the black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson. And with the support of a galvanized nation now behind it, the Voting Rights Bill was signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965.
In 1967, Dr. King noted, “The failure to mention Jimmy [sic] Jackson only reinforced the impression that to white Americans the life of a Negro is insignificant and meaningless.”
Fifty years after Bloody Sunday, these issues are as important as ever.
Selma: Experienced as a Child, Remembered as an Adult
Sophia Bracy is seen in a relative’s two-room shack in Redland, Alabama. After her family’s house was bombed in January 1966, they stayed with relatives as their new home was being built. Jim Peppler, a photographer, made the image, which was published in the Southern Courier in December 1967. The image is used with permission from the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
The world's attention will be on Alabama from March 5 to 9, as people remember the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. They'll also focus on progress.
Sophia Bracy Harris | Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama March 3, 2015
It was New Year’s Day, January 1, 1966. My older sister, several of my younger siblings, a cousin and I had attended the annual Elmore County Emancipation Proclamation Celebration (the observance of Abraham Lincoln’s signing the proclamation freeing Blacks from slavery).
The guest speaker for this occasion was a Birmingham civil rights preacher, Rev. Jesse Douglas, whose powerful message and melodious voice singing, “I told Jesus that it would be all right, if he changed my name,” had the audience on its feet for most of his sermon.
Little did I know that he was preparing us for the most traumatic experience of our lives, which would take place in less than four hours.
We went home, excitedly sharing with our parents the experience of the evening with this wonderful civil rights preacher. Our parents listened and allowed us an opportunity to get settled, before giving us the final warning to cut off the light and go to sleep.
At around 1 a.m., less than two hours after our arrival, homemade fire bombs hit three different sides of our house. Exploding flames blocked all exits except one.
There were 11 of us inside, and nine were asleep. Thank God we all made it out safely. Our home burned to the ground.
Although my dad gave the sheriff a homemade bomb that had bounced into his pickup truck that night without exploding, the news reported there was “no evidence of foul play.” No investigation was ever done.
My sister and I were among the first Black students to attend Wetumpka High School under a Freedom of Choice plan.
Our motive was simple: We wanted the best education possible in order to attend Tuskegee Institute (University).
It was a decision made with my parents but not any organized effort. Although I will hasten to add that my family was active in the NAACP. My uncle was chapter president, and my sister and I were both in leadership roles in the youth chapter.
On the first day of school in early fall 1965, we arrived at the high school, seven Black students and five mothers, greeted by a sea of angry, jeering White people, mostly men. There were no police escorts, and there was no form of protection.
I think back with reverence at the courage it took for those mothers to leave their children in what was clearly imminent danger and return to their homes to wait — and to hope and pray that their children would return home safely.
Black teachers were recruited to tutor us and help us process spiteful and punitive assignments by White teachers. We knew our actions were about something bigger.
We were doing this, as my mother said, “for the advancement of the race.” She, along with others in our community, would encourage us: “We are so proud of you” and “You are a credit to your race.”
We sang freedom songs as a way to build our spirit and retain our focus.
Two weeks into the school term at Wetumpka High, a fight between my sister and a White boy resulted in the arrest, jailing and expulsion of my sister.
Civil rights marchers participate in the walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in March 1965. Photo by Peter Pettus. Image source: Library of Congress.
She was expelled for a semester for hitting back a White boy who had pelted her with a sling shot rock.
The sheriff held my sister, a high school teenager, in the county jail overnight. The boy was not punished.
Life in the Bracy family was strained at the time, then it got worse. I was trying to adjust to daily taunts from students, teachers who ignored my raised hand and skipped over me in class.
My father was dealing with a hostile White land owner, who was making threats based on the smallest of things and actively trying to block the school bus from coming across his property to pick us up.
My mother was frantically trying to talk to anybody she could to get my sister back in school.
Four months later, with the help of lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice, my sister returned to Wetumpka High. It was on the day prior to her return, our home was bombed.
Because our family was so large, we were scattered out in the homes of our uncle and three of our neighbors, wearing clothes that were given by many who did not know us, but wanted to help. We did not miss one day of school.
With the help of American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) Family Aid Fund, our family survived a year of make-shift living arrangements before returning to a normal home life.
It was through the staff of AFSC that we learned about the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. I received scholarships to attend Alabama Christian College and Auburn University, formerly all-White schools.
I remember the pride that Black teachers took in educating us children when schools were segregated.
Schools in the Black community had a deep sense of the importance of our education.
Certainly schools were horribly under-funded — we lacked books, learned in crumbling buildings and used leftover supplies from White students. And yet, even in this climate, our teachers and principals often showed great love for learning.
We believed that education was key to our development as human beings. Classroom walls were filled with images of Blacks who were a “credit to our race.”
Black history celebrations and assembly programs were opportunities for those personalities to be brought to life through dramatic presentations and performances by students.
Roosevelt and Marie Bracy are seen with their eight children in 1974. Sophia Bracy has her hair wrapped. Image courtesy of Sophia Bracy Harris.
We were painfully reminded how unfair this system was by the worn school books with the names of White students, often expressing their love for another; the one microscope in our biology lab; and the old run-down bus that left us stranded at least once a week, while the White students rode in a more modern, reliable school bus.
Yes, we knew that this system was unjust and wrong.
Today, we know it is wrong that one third of all African American males in Alabama are incarcerated and have lost the right to vote. It is wrong when we are funding prisons and the military far more generously than the education of our children.
Fifty years ago, it was voting literacy tests and poll taxes that were used to deny Black people the right to vote.
Today, incarceration, criminal records and photo identification are key barriers to voting rights.
As we commemorate the acts of heroism and courage of ordinary men, women and children, resulting in the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, we call upon every policymaker to advocate restoration of Section V of this Act.
We honor the legacy of Bloody Sunday by answering the call to fight injustice anywhere because it is a threat to justice everywhere.
March 9: The 50th anniversary march from Selma to Montgomery will start at 8 a.m. (Central). Events start on March 5 [ http://www.selma50.com/ ]. President Obama will visit on March 7.
A powerful and recently rediscovered film made during the [March 21-25,] 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. Stefan Sharff's intimate documentary reflects his youthful work in the montage style under the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. The film features moving spirituals. Marchers include Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King. (NJ state film festival)
The road from Selma was paved with the blood of four unsung martyrs
Adelle M. Banks March 5, 2015
(RNS) They were just four of the thousands of Americans who came to Selma 50 years ago, heeding the call of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for people of conscience to join in protesting the plight of African-Americans in Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement.
The four marytrs — a Baptist deacon, a minister, a Unitarian laywoman and an Episcopal seminarian — are largely unknown, but they’re being remembered for sacrificing their lives for the rights of others.
The names of all four are etched in the Civil Rights Memorial [ http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs ] in Montgomery, Ala., along with 36 others — starting with Mississippi minister George Lee, who died in 1955, and ending with King, who was assassinated in 1968.
“The gravity of his call for justice in the South became punctuated even more graphically by these deaths,” said Montgomery historian Richard Bailey.
The Baptist deacon: Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jimmie Lee Jackson was a 26-year-old deacon of his Baptist church in Marion, Ala., and had been involved in local protests. Photo courtesy of Southern Poverty Law Center
“His death is what really precipitated the march from Selma to Montgomery,” Bailey said. Jackson was a 26-year-old deacon of his Baptist church in Marion, Ala., and had been active in local protests.
“He actually attempted to register to vote about five times before his death,” said Brandon Owens, staff research associate at the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture [ http://www.lib.alasu.edu/natctr/ ] at Alabama State University.
Jackson was fleeing police who attacked protesters after a peaceful demonstration. He was shot inside a Marion cafe at the hands of an Alabama state trooper while trying to protect his grandfather and mother on Feb. 18, 1965, and died eight days later.
Angered by his death — a pivotal scene in the recent film “Selma” — some protesters wanted to lay Jackson’s body at the foot of the Alabama Capitol.
“They did not do that in actuality,” said Janice Franklin, project director of the civil rights center. “But that was the original message that they wanted to send, not only to Alabama and the Capitol, but also to send a signal around the world that blacks were being killed here in Alabama trying to vote.”
In his eulogy for Jackson, King called many — including his fellow clergy — to account: “He was murdered by the indifference of every white minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of his stained-glass windows.”
In 2010, former trooper James Bonard Fowler pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor manslaughter charge in Jackson’s slaying and was sentenced to six months in prison.
The Unitarian minister: the Rev. James Reeb
The Rev. James Reeb, father of four and Unitarian Universalist minister. Photo courtesy of Unitarian Universalist Association
“Four men came at us from across the street,” recalled the Rev. Clark Olsen, now 81 and living in Asheville, N.C. “One of them was carrying a club and swung it at Jim’s head.”
Reeb, Olsen and another white Unitarian Universalist minister had just met and decided to eat dinner together on March 9, 1965, after the second, aborted “Turnaround Tuesday” march. All three had headed to Selma to answer King’s call for ministers to join him there. They were about to return from supper to the church where there was a meeting with King when the white men shouted at them: “Hey, you niggers!”
Reeb, a 38-year-old father of four, was taken to a Birmingham hospital and died two days later.
His trip to Selma wasn’t the first time he worked to improve the lives of African-Americans. He had taken a job with a Quaker organization in Boston to work on housing issues.
“He felt it was appropriate to live among the people he was working with,” Olsen said. “He was just a very committed person this way and wanted to do good in the world and right some of the wrongs in our society.”
King preached Reeb’s eulogy, and hours later, President Lyndon B. Johnson mentioned Reeb’s death and the violence of Selma when he addressed Congress to introduce the Voting Rights Act: “Many were brutally assaulted; one good man, a man of God, was killed.”
Three white men were charged in Reeb’s death. All were acquitted.
The Unitarian laywoman: Viola Liuzzo
Viola Liuzzo, 39, a mother of five, drove her 1963 Oldsmobile to Selma and had planned to stay for a week. Photo courtesy of Unitarian Universalist Association
“Her affiliation with Unitarians did influence her decision to drive south,” said her daughter, Sally, of her mother’s trek from Detroit. “However, even if she was not involved in any church, she would have went anyways; that is who she was. She loved her country and knew segregation was not right; she wanted a better world for her children.”
Liuzzo, 39, a mother of five, drove her 1963 Oldsmobile to Selma and had planned to stay for a week. “She came here because she was civil rights-minded,” said Bailey. “She wanted to help.”
She died on March 25, 1965, shortly after the conclusion of the last of the three marches from Selma. She was killed by shots fired from a car of Ku Klux Klansmen — who spotted a white woman and a black man in a car together — as she drove another civil rights worker from Selma to Montgomery.
Her decision to come to Alabama, after hearing King’s call for ministers and others, was a continuation of her earlier work on social justice.
“Before becoming active in civil rights, she was an advocate for education and economic justice reform and was arrested twice — in both cases requesting a trial to publicize her cause,” according to UU World [ http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/6962.shtml ] magazine, a publication of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
One of the four white men in the car was an FBI informant. The other three were sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy but were not found guilty of murder.
The Episcopal seminarian: Jonathan Daniels
Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels of Keene, N.H. Religion News Service file photo
“He pulled me out of the way and the bullet hit him instead,” said Ruby Sales, now 66, recalling the day, Aug. 20, 1965, that Daniels saved her life and lost his.
They had just been released from jail, where they were held with other civil rights workers who were protesting the exploitation of black sharecroppers by white plantation owners in Fort Deposit, Ala. Daniels, 26, and Sales were in a group of people who stopped at a store to buy a soda. A white special deputy sheriff aimed a gun at Sales, and Daniels took the shot.
Daniels, the valedictorian of his class at the Virginia Military Institute, had left his Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Mass., and headed to Selma, like others, answering King’s call after the first “Bloody Sunday” march. But unlike many who left, he stayed and worked on voter registration in Lowndes County and also pushed for the integration of a white Episcopal congregation in Selma.
“He was not there because he had no other options in life,” said Sales, founder of the SpiritHouse Project, a social justice nonprofit in Atlanta. “He was there because he chose to be there.”
Montgomery historian Alston Fitts, who was a Harvard grad school classmate of Daniels, said the white seminarian worked hard to not respond to hate in kind. He defended white Southerners to his Northern friends as “imperfect Christians.”
King said of Daniels, according to a VMI website: “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.”
The white man charged in his death was acquitted. In 1991, Daniels was recognized as a saint of the Episcopal Church [ http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution.pl?resolution=1991-B006 ] and is remembered each Aug. 14. His Cambridge alma mater and Episcopalians from Atlanta and Alabama plan to mark the 50th anniversary of his death with a pilgrimage to the site of his slaying in August.
A roadside sign for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. (Alabama Department of Archives and History)
Only a few miles away from where the legendary march began, a new phase of civil-rights activism gathered momentum.
Benjamin Hedin Mar 6 2015, 7:30 AM ET
Anyone who was not a diehard white supremacist could see the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 for what it was: a myth in motion, advancing east through the Alabama countryside at two miles an hour. It recalled other famous wanderings, like the trek of the Israelites and Gandhi’s 1930 pilgrimage to the sea, and ended in a place of rich historical association. Montgomery was named the first capital of the Confederacy in 1861, and when Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the crowd at the march’s end he stood on the spot where just two years earlier George Wallace had declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” With passage of the Voting Rights Act at hand, there could be no better place to hold the victory party.
The march itself was a spectacle or symbol, hugely necessary and memorable, but what the power of the ballot actually meant—how it would affect the lives of African Americans, especially in the South—had yet to be decided. One answer came in the days after with the first stirrings of a new political party in the county adjacent to Selma. That party, which took the black panther as its symbol, moved the debate from the theoretical equality of the Voting Rights Act to the practical reality of Black Power.
The march to Montgomery took place on Highway 80, a road that traverses Alabama’s Black Belt and narrows to two lanes east of Selma, when it enters Lowndes County. The court order permitting the demonstration stated only three hundred marchers could pass along this section of the road, as one lane had to be left open for traffic. Most of the spots were given to locals, with a few dozen reserved for King’s entourage and other visitors and dignitaries. Not among those three hundred selected was Stokely Carmichael, a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, one of the leading civil rights groups of the day. But he went to Lowndes anyway, with Bob Mants, another SNCC member who had stood in the second line of protestors—immediately behind John Lewis—during the infamous Bloody Sunday attack on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“We trailed that march,” Carmichael later recalled. “Every time local folks came out, we’d sit and talk with them, get their names, find out where they lived, their address, what church, who their ministers were, like that. So all the information, everything, you’d need to organize, we got.”
Lowndes County—where, incidentally, Selma director Ava DuVernay spent her summers while growing up—was rigidly segregated and feudal. Twelve thousand of its 15,000 residents in 1965 were African American. Many worked as tenant farmers on plantations or commuted to domestic jobs in Montgomery. County politics was a strictly white affair since blacks were barred from registering to vote; there was no record of a single African American voting in Lowndes County in the twentieth century.
Carmichael and Mants returned to Lowndes on March 27, 1965—two days after the march to Montgomery ended. They were joined by three others from SNCC. While the organization had canvassed in the area before, these early efforts were looser or less systematic, “a little more scatter gun,” according to Judy Richardson, who was among those visiting the county that day. “What the march allowed us to do was get into better contact with folks who were already activated, who had already thought about organizing around voter registration in Lowndes County.”
In the coming weeks Richardson and the others knocked on doors and met with people, often early in the morning, to review electoral procedures and encourage turnout at mass meetings. They lived in Selma to start, until a couple, Emma and Mathew Jackson, Sr., donated a house for their use. Its four rooms made for a spartan headquarters. The structure sat on cinderblocks, was equipped with one butane heater but no refrigerator or plumbing, and its roof was so shoddy organizers were obliged to carry pots into bed each time it rained.
But comfort was the least of their concerns, for the specter of mob violence trailed their every move. In August of 1965, Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian from New England who attended the march to Montgomery and stayed in Alabama to help SNCC, was gunned down in Hayneville in Lowndes County. Anyone providing help to SNCC faced retaliation. Shots were fired into the Jacksons’ home, and their sixteen year-old son lost his job as a bus driver for sharing the activists’ leaflets with his passengers. Sharecroppers who had been seen at mass meetings or tried to register were sent eviction notices.
SNCC held on, despite the terror and intimidation. “The question became how do we not only get people registered to vote, but how would we begin to deal with the issues that confronted them,” says Courtland Cox, a SNCC organizer who helped coordinate the Lowndes County program in 1965 and 1966. “We have to get people to run for office—people who had not only not run for office but never voted to get engaged in a way that would allow them to think they could run the political mechanisms of the county.”
Carmichael was more blunt. “We intend to take over Lowndes County,” he told one reporter. The attitude and intention signaled an important new direction for SNCC and by extension the whole civil rights movement. The previous year, SNCC had helped recruit an alternate slate of delegates to attend the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Mississippi’s own delegates, they claimed in a lawsuit, had been illegally appointed, since nearly half the state—its African American population—was effectively disenfranchised. But the appeal was lost; the alternate delegates were not allowed to participate in the convention, and many in the movement concluded that black protest was incompatible with mainstream politics.
“It’s a different tack for SNCC,” Richardson says of the work they did in Lowndes County. “We realized we could no longer operate within the Democratic Party structure and had to think about independent organizing. After Atlantic City it’s very clear that traditional politics is not about morality. It’s about power.”
Jack Minnis, the head of SNCC’s research department, began studying the twelve volumes that comprised the Alabama Code of Laws. He found a statute that permitted independent political parties at the county level; ironically, it was one devised by Confederates during Reconstruction as a way of winning back political control. The party, it said, must hold a convention on the date of the spring primary and nominate candidates for the general election in the fall. If one of them received 20 percent of the vote come November, the state would recognize the party. With the Voting Rights Act taking effect in August of 1965—which meant federal examiners would oversee registration in Lowndes County—20 percent seemed like a manageable figure.
One last stipulation was that each party had to have a logo, in part to aid the unlettered, since back then any Alabaman who could not read would cast a ballot simply by looking at the symbol appearing next to a candidate’s name. Once the party—called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization—was chartered, Cox phoned the SNCC office in Atlanta and said they needed a logo to adorn the membership cards.
“The first thing I did was a bird,” recalls Ruth Howard Chapman, then a member of SNCC’s research team. Minnis, however, disliked the initial drawing, which showed a dove, and mentioned the panther mascot of nearby Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University). “I can remember going over to Clark,” says Chapman, “and going in this office. There was a faculty person there and he pulled out a brochure and we traced that cat. Jack said, ‘Well, that’s fine!’ So we put it on and sent the cards down to Lowndes County.”
An early LFCO pamphlet. (H.K. Yuen Archive)
The choice seemed especially apt given that the logo for the all-white Alabama Democratic Party was a rooster, and “panthers eat roosters,” as those in SNCC grew fond of saying. “Pull the lever for the Black Panther and go home” became the party’s motto, blazoned on flyers and billboards. A Lowndes County pamphlet found its way to Oakland in 1966, where Huey Newton and Bobby Seale decided to name their own party [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party ] after the logo. Seale would explain, “I asked Huey, ‘Why would they have a charging black panther?’ Later he came up with the point that if you push a panther into a corner, if he can’t go left and he can’t go right, he will tend to come out of that corner to wipe out its aggressor.”
Newton and Seale were both captivated by Carmichael, who in 1966 unleashed the call for Black Power and became that doctrine’s most prominent exponent. The phrase took on fractured and contorted meanings. Whites beheld it with horror and fascination, but the mysticism surrounding the term obscures the logical and democratic force of its call. Why shouldn’t a community that’s 80 percent African American have a black mayor or probate judge? That was the very question, of course, aired repeatedly last summer during the Ferguson riots. And it’s why Cox regrets how the story of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization has retreated from view, becoming the property of just a few SNCC survivors and academic historians.
“There were a lot of lessons learned and approaches taken that could be very helpful to the movement today,” he says. “I do wish there was a way to celebrate what we did in Lowndes. Not because it should be celebrated for itself, but it’s much more of a model that we need to follow. ‘Every time there’s a problem we need to march; every time there’s a problem we need to make demands.’ We need to get out of that. When the real political issues come up, go out and vote in the numbers, build coalitions. You don’t have that kind of organizational discipline.”
The effects of the Lowndes County coalition would be felt in the next decade and beyond. African Americans were elected to the posts of sheriff and county commissioner in the 1970s, and John Jackson, the teenager who lost his job for distributing leaflets, served as mayor of White Hall, a town in northern Lowndes County, for twenty years. Ultimately, SNCC’s project there should be considered a little known but heroic slant on one of America’s most basic and cherished principles: self-rule. And while the two versions of the Panthers were split on many subjects—a proposed alliance between SNCC and Oakland’s Black Panther Party was eventually called off—this was one aim to which both aspired. After all, when Huey Newton published his platform in 1967, the first item read, “We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.”
“If you are going to deal with the issues that affect you,” Cox says today, fifty years on, “you got to figure out how to stop making demands, but making decisions.” For him that remains the legacy of the march from Selma to Montgomery: not the pageantry or symbolic glory of the scene, but the responsibilities it afforded. “You can’t keep asking people who you say oppress you to deal with the nature of your oppression,” he says. “At the end of the day you have to deal with it.”
‘Selma sowed, but it did not reap'; anniversary puts spotlight on deep poverty
A woman walks along downtown carrying an American flag as she waits for the arrival of U.S. President Barack Obama in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 2015. With a nod to ongoing U.S. racial tension and attempts to limit voting rights, Obama declared the work of the Civil Rights Movement advanced but unfinished on Saturday during a visit to the Alabama bridge that spawned a landmark voting law. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Tami Chappell
Aamer Madhani March 9, 2015
SELMA, Ala.(RNS) With the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday this weekend, America was reminded how this small city helped bring sweeping change to the nation.
But while Selma might have transformed America, in many ways time has stood still in this community of 20,000 that was at the center of the push that culminated with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat, was the poorest county in Alabama last year. Selma has an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent; the national rate is 5.5 percent.
More than 40 percent of families and 67 percent of children in the county live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average. The Birmingham News called the region, known as the Black Belt because of its rich soil, “Alabama’s Third World.”
“Selma sowed, but it did not reap,” says James Perkins Jr., who became the city’s first African-American mayor in 2000. “So many of the benefits that went to other places in the South and around the world since the Voting Act of 1965 did not come to Selma. I hope this 50th anniversary will help Selma begin reaping some of those benefits.”
The world’s eyes were again on Selma this weekend as tens of thousands of people, including President Obama and his family, came to commemorate the marches here that raised the nation’s consciousness and led to the end of discriminatory practices that largely excluded blacks from the ballot box.
As America honors the heroes of 1965, many are expressing grief over how Selma has weathered the past half-century.
Not long after blacks began making political headway here after passage of the Voting Rights Act, this city’s economy collapsed.
Craig Air Force Base, which hosted undergraduate pilot training, was closed in 1977. The base housed about 2,500 people and contributed millions of dollars to the local economy.
After the marches of 1965, white flight began. About 10,000 white residents have left Selma in the past three decades, leaving it 80 percent African-American.
The city’s downtown, which sits along the Alabama River, has a bucolic charm from afar, but it is pocked with as many vacant buildings as occupied ones.
“It feels like nothing new has come here in decades,” says Hubbert Fitzpatrick, 65, who grew up in the area and now lives in Houston. “It’s a little bit sad.”
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson points to the old home in Selma of Amelia Boynton Robinson, who played a key role in the 1965 marches, as a tragic symbol of what’s become of Selma. Her home was where a group of congressmen, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders gathered to write the first draft of the Voting Rights Act.
Now the home sits boarded up, indistinguishable from the many other vacant houses in that neighborhood.
“We really should be focused on protest rather than celebration,” Jackson says. “We are under attack in this season.”
David Garrow, a historian and author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” says he decided to skip this week’s events because Selma has become “a symbolic holiday for celebrities” rather than a solemn commemoration of the goals of the Selma campaign — including the need to fight poverty.
Instead, the celebrations in Selma have the effect of “reducing history to a photo opp,” Garrow says.
“The focus should be on investment and economic development in places like Selma,” Garrow says. “The focus should be on what we can do for Selma, not what Selma can do for us.”
(Aamer Madhani writes for USA Today. Reporter David Jackson contributed this report.)
Fifty Years After Bloody Sunday in Selma, Everything and Nothing Has Changed
Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King and others march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965. (James “Spider” Martin Photographic Archive/Briscoe Center, University of Texas at Austin)
Racism, segregation and inequality persist in this civil-rights battleground.
Ari Berman February 25, 2015 This article appeared in the March 16, 2015 edition of The Nation.
Congress can’t agree on much these days, but on February 11, the House unanimously passed a resolution awarding the Congressional Gold Medal—the body’s highest honor—to the foot soldiers of the 1965 voting-rights movement in Selma, Alabama.
The resolution was sponsored by Representative Terri Sewell, Alabama’s first black Congresswoman, who grew up in Selma. Sewell was born on January 1, 1965, a day before Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma to kick off the demonstrations that would result in passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) eight months later. On February 15, 2015, Sewell returned to Selma, which she now represents, to honor the “unsung heroes” of the voting-rights movement at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the red brick headquarters for Selma’s civil-rights activists in 1965, taking the pulpit where King once preached.
The film Selma has brought renewed attention to the dramatic protests of 1965. Tens of thousands of people, including President Obama, will converge on the city on March 7, the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when 600 marchers, including John Lewis, now a Congressman, were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers.
At Brown Chapel, Sewell stressed the disturbing parallels between the fight for voting rights then and now. She cited the Supreme Court’s gutting of the VRA in 2013 and the spread of voter-ID laws that disproportionately burden minority voters. “The assaults of the past are here again,” she said. “Old battles have become new again.” Sewell’s mother, Nancy, Selma’s first black city councilwoman, read the names of the two dozen foot soldiers as Sewell presented each of them with a gold certificate. The loudest applause greeted 85-year-old Frederick Douglas Reese, who strode down the aisle in a sharp pinstripe suit. “My principal!” Sewell called him.
Rep. Terri Sewell (right) presents a gold certificate to Frederick Douglas Reese (center), with the Rev. Leodis Strong, at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, February 2015. (Photo by the author)
Reese is the ultimate unsung hero—the most important figure in Selma’s voting-rights movement, but virtually unknown outside town. While president of the Dallas County Voters League in 1964, he signed the letter officially inviting King to Selma. As leader of the Selma Teachers Association, Reese led the first major march of black public school teachers in the segregated South; they sought to register to vote. He marched behind Lewis on Bloody Sunday and alongside King and his wife, Coretta, from Selma to Montgomery two weeks later. Molotov cocktails were thrown at his house, and he was fired from his job because of his activism, but Reese never wavered. In 1972, he became one of five black members elected to the City Council—Selma’s first black elected officials since Reconstruction. He was principal of Selma High School and superintendent of the city schools, and has pastored the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church for fifty years.
Civil-rights history is everywhere in Selma—streets are named after activists like Reese, J.L. Chestnut and Marie Foster, and the main road to Montgomery crosses the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Bloody Sunday took place. Reese’s office is decorated with photos of him marching with King. “The Lord had me at the right place, at the right time, with no sense,” he says.
Sewell and Reese are living testaments to the impact of the VRA. In 1964, there were roughly 300 blacks registered to vote in the county. Today, every important office in Selma is led by an African-American, from Congress to the mayor to the chief of police. But a closer look shows how much progress has yet to be achieved.
The now-dilapidated house of Amelia Boynton Robinson, where Frederick Reese wrote the letter inviting Martin Luther King to Selma. (Photo by the author)
Reese wrote the letter inviting King to Selma at the house of Amelia Boynton Robinson, who at the age of 103 attended the State of the Union address this year as Sewell’s guest. Today that house is boarded up, as are so many of the small shotgun houses on the historically black east side of town. Some homes still don’t have plumbing or running water. Formerly middle-class black neighborhoods now resemble post-Katrina New Orleans.
The statistics are staggering—Dallas County was the poorest in Alabama last year, with unemployment double the state and national average. More than 40 percent of families live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average. The Alabama Policy Institute named Selma the “least Business-Friendly City” in the state. Selma describes itself as the “Queen City of the Black Belt,” but The Birmingham News more aptly labeled the region, named the Black Belt because of its rich soil, as “Alabama’s Third World.” Ten thousand white residents have left Selma in the past three decades, leaving it 80 percent African-American. There are nearly as many vacant buildings as occupied ones in the once picturesque downtown, and side streets are desolate.
Blacks now control Selma politically, but long-standing racial disparities persist. The west side, where most whites live, has tall pines, manicured lawns and the city’s only country club, which remains all-white. Despite Selma’s stark poverty, girls were playing tennis and the parking lot was filled with Escalades on a recent Saturday afternoon.
Old wounds have not healed in Selma, which was founded as a major slave-trading center. There are still rotting slave quarters in back alleys, and massive foundries that produced weapons for the Confederate Army still line the banks of the Alabama River. Every April, a month after the Bloody Sunday commemoration, hundreds come to town to re-enact the Battle of Selma, when Union troops burned the city to the ground. Some also pay respects to Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the KKK, whose memorial in the city’s moss-draped Confederate cemetery describes him as “one of the South’s finest heroes.”
Selma remains defined by its past, whether it be 1865 or 1965. Too many people visit the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a Confederate general who led the Alabama Klan) and the voting-rights museum across the street but never dig any deeper. “We have to move beyond the bridge,” Sewell said at Brown Chapel. “It’s not just about one commemoration on one day. We have to live Selma.” The historical focus on Bloody Sunday—as important as it is—has too often obscured the many problems facing the city today. “Selma has done a lot more for the rest of the world than it has done for itself,” the city’s first black mayor, James Perkins, often says.
In Selma, it feels like everything and nothing has changed.
* * *
John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC, being beaten by Alabama state troopers on Bloody Sunday. (James “Spider” Martin Photographic Archive/Briscoe Center, University of Texas at Austin)
Four days after the passage of the VRA in August 1965, federal examiners from the US Civil Service Commission arrived in town to begin registering voters. The first blacks registered under the act were signed up in Selma. By the time of the first major election in Alabama following the VRA, in May 1966, the number of black registered voters in Dallas County had surged from well under 1,000 before the VRA to over 10,000.
Black voters finally had a chance to get even with Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, who had tyrannically enforced segregation for over a decade. In the 1966 primary, Selma’s moderate public safety director, Wilson Baker, squared off against Clark for sheriff. Newly enfranchised African-Americans embraced Baker’s candidacy, and it was expected that with all ballots in, Baker would defeat Clark with enough votes to avoid a runoff.
But the next morning, Clark’s allies on the Dallas County Democratic Executive Committee tried to steal the election, refusing to count six boxes of ballots from Selma’s black wards, which they claimed were “infected with irregularities.” The Justice Department immediately sought an injunction from the federal courts, which ruled in its favor under the VRA. The ballots were counted, and Clark, a major foe of the civil-rights movement, was finally out of a job. It was the first symbol of how consequential the new law would be, and also signaled that any progress in Selma would not come without a major fight.
“The Voting Rights Act had a tremendous impact on Selma, particularly when there were certain blacks who were initially skeptical about going to the courthouse to get registered,” Reese says. “After it was passed, we were able to convince many people to register and cast a ballot.”
Electing blacks to office would be a harder task. Seven years after Bloody Sunday, the number of black registered voters had reached near parity with white voters, but there were still no black elected officials in Dallas County. That was because candidates for offices like the Selma City Council were elected “at large”—citywide instead of by district. Since whites retained a slight voter-registration advantage, they were able to elect all of their preferred candidates. The black half of town remained effectively disenfranchised. At-large elections were the chief obstacle to minority representation in the years following passage of the VRA, not just in Selma but throughout the country.
When Selma civil-rights lawyer J.L. Chestnut threatened to sue the ten-member City Council under the VRA, the town’s white leaders unexpectedly agreed to shift to district-based elections. As a result, five blacks, including Reese, were elected to the City Council. Reese would become the second most powerful figure in city government. “Even white people had to go through him if they wanted a stop sign,” wrote Chestnut.
* * *
But just as Selma was integrating politically, its economy collapsed. Craig Air Force Base, where thousands of pilots had been trained since World War II, closed in 1977. The base had housed over 2,500 people and contributed $5 million a year to the city’s economy. “I saw my town dry up,” Sewell says. “You no longer had people coming from across the country to make Selma their home.”
Economic challenges raised the stakes for political control of the area. In 1978, the Justice Department sued the all-white Dallas County Commission and school board under Section 2 of the VRA, alleging that at-large elections for county offices prevented black candidates from winning. Reese was one of the lead plaintiffs. Judge William Brevard Hand, a notorious racial conservative, ruled twice against the department and bottlenecked the lawsuit. It took ten years—and multiple trips to the appeals court—before Hand relented and ordered the county to draw new districts for the county commission and school board, which elected blacks for the first time in 1988.
The integration of county government took far longer than anyone expected. “There was a gross underestimation of the obstacles to voting when the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed,” says State Senator Hank Sanders, who in 1983 became Selma’s first black state representative.
In 1989, U.W. Clemon, Alabama’s first black federal judge, swore in three black commissioners at the Dallas County Courthouse—the first black commissioners in 112 years. “We bring home to Dallas County the harvest of the Martin Luther King Voting Rights Act,” Clemon said. Reese delivered the invocation. “Out of the Egypt of Selma,” he said, “you brought us from nowhere to somewhere.” Justice Department lawyers flew down for the ceremony. “I predict that some day students of modern history will point to Selma, Alabama, as twentieth-century America’s cradle of democracy,” said Jim Turner, who was acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.
But racial strife soon followed. In 1990, the Selma school board, which whites controlled six to five, fired the city’s first black superintendent, Norward Roussell, who was previously area superintendent of the New Orleans schools. Black school board members walked out in protest. Picketers descended on City Hall, and black students staged a five-day sit-in at Selma High School. The National Guard was sent in to restore order. Six hundred white students were pulled out of public schools by their parents and never returned. Selma High became 99 percent black. The school system never recovered, and last year it was taken over by the state because of poor performance. “It’s resegregated,” says Sewell, the first black valedictorian at Selma High. “I wonder if my old high school could reproduce me today.”
Black residents focused their ire on Mayor Joe Smitherman, who, according to Newsweek, called Roussell “an overpaid nigger from New Orleans.” (Smitherman denied the accusation.) Smitherman had been in office since 1964, craftily winning election after election with the help of a powerful patronage machine. Reese had unsuccessfully run against him in 1984, but in 2000 Reese’s campaign manager, James Perkins, finally ousted Smitherman, becoming Selma’s first black mayor. “It was powerful symbolically,” says Hank Sanders. “Selma had given the nation the Voting Rights Act, and yet Selma still had the same mayor who was here in 1965 in the year 2000.”
Perkins, a computer technician, brought new industries to Selma, raised the minimum wage for city employees, put African-Americans in charge of city departments and improved services in the black community. In 2008, George Evans, the first black president of the City Council, replaced Perkins as mayor. But neither Perkins nor Evans has been able to reverse many of the problems facing the city: chronic unemployment, segregated schools, high crime, aging infrastructure.
Selma is not Ferguson; black political power is a fact of life here. Economic power is another story. “The biggest obstacle has been that even when there is black electoral power, the economic power is nearly all white,” Sanders says. For example, in 2009, blacks made up 27 percent of Alabama’s population, but owned only 3 percent of the state’s agriculture and 2 percent of its timberland—the largest industries in the Black Belt. Amendments to the Alabama Constitution, pushed through by Gov. George Wallace in the 1970s following integration of the state’s schools, taxed agriculture and timberland at only 10 percent of market value, depriving areas like Selma of millions of dollars in revenue. As a result, “the children of the rural poor, whether black or white, are left to struggle as best as they can in underfunded, dilapidated schools,” District Court Judge Lynwood Smith wrote in 2011.
Selma, says Sewell, is “emblematic of rural communities across this nation that have been left behind.”
* * *
Sean and Tylisa Black moved from Denver to Selma in 2007, after Sean visited on a civil-rights pilgrimage. It was too late to enroll their 4-year-old daughter, Shania, in public school, so they sent her to a predominantly white private preschool. When it came time for kindergarten, Shania told her parents she wanted to attend Morgan Academy, a segregated private school founded by whites three months after Bloody Sunday. Morgan was named after Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan, a Confederate general and a grand dragon of the KKK in the 1870s. Morgan Academy had never accepted an African-American student, but the Blacks applied for Shania, and, to their surprise, she was admitted.
They were told to expect twenty-five people at the first parents meeting. Five hundred showed up, packing the school’s gym: parents, aunts, grandparents and alumni. “Our heritage is being ruined,” Sean remembers hearing over and over again. One board member resigned on the spot. Dallas County District Court Judge Bob Armstrong leaned over and told Sean, “I’m sorry. This kind of behavior reminds me of the 1960s.”
Shania was not personally bullied, but older siblings of her friends were beat up and called “nigger lovers.” She couldn’t sleep over at her white friends’ houses, and nobody from her school would come to her birthday parties. Graffiti on the back of Walmart depicted Shania being lynched. “Nigger” it said, pointing to her head. “Hang the bitches,” it said below, next to “MLK is a homosexual” and a drawing of a swastika. Shania spent two unhappy years at Morgan before leaving for the public elementary school. Now in sixth grade, she attends a private “freedom school” affiliated with the Selma Community Church, the only truly integrated church in town.
A mentoring program that Sean and Tylisa started for at-risk kids at the courthouse was defunded after Shania enrolled at Morgan. The retribution didn’t end there. The Blacks moved to town along with fifty-seven other members of a Denver nonprofit called the Freedom Foundation, which focuses on youth empowerment and social justice issues. The new arrivals, determined to challenge Selma’s segregated institutions, met with Reese for guidance and encouragement. The group’s founder, Mark Duke, bought a grand Victorian mansion in an integrated neighborhood near downtown. After Shania enrolled at Morgan, vandals covered his house in toilet paper and spray-painted “Go Home” on his lawn. He received death threats, and an anti–Freedom Foundation website was started by white supremacists. The Department of Homeland Security came to investigate. Duke relocated his family to Atlanta after two years. “When I moved here, I thought most of these issues were gone,” he says. “I was shocked to see the depths of it.”
Race is far more of a factor in Selma than the Blacks anticipated. “It’s like when you come to Alabama and you have to pick Alabama or Auburn as your team,” Sean says. “When you come to Selma, you have to pick a side.”
The unyielding racial divide in Selma is emblematic of the problems facing the city. “Everybody knows the fiftieth anniversary is coming up, so if you look around the city, there’s a lot of action and covering things up to make sure things look good, when it’s really falling apart,” Sean says. “If we don’t look at why it’s falling apart, then how can we move forward?”
* * *
On July 27, 2006, President George W. Bush signed legislation reauthorizing the VRA for another twenty-five years. He invited Selma Mayor James Perkins to the Rose Garden signing ceremony and thanked him in his speech. Seven years later, the Supreme Court struck down the most important part of the VRA, the requirement that states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, like Alabama, approve voting changes with the federal government. Announcing the decision from the bench, Chief Justice John Roberts cited the election of a black mayor in Selma as a reason why the VRA’s powerful federal oversight was no longer needed.
Perkins finds that deeply ironic. “The gutting of the act was synonymous with gutting the people who worked so hard to achieve the act in the first place,” Perkins says, thinking of his mentor, Reese. “I took it personally. When you are part of the change, and you see those changes reversed and know they were for the better, it really hurts.” Selma was not just the birthplace of the VRA; the law protected minority voters from discriminatory election schemes on more than ten different occasions from the 1970s to the ’90s.
Legislation to strengthen the VRA in the wake of the Court’s decision has gone nowhere in Congress. The House unanimously approved Sewell’s bill honoring the foot soldiers of Selma, but only eleven Republicans have sponsored the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 in the House, and none in the Senate.
It remains to be seen whether Congress can move from symbolism to substance on civil rights. Sewell and Lewis recently screened Selma at the Capitol with Republican lawmakers and plan to welcome a large bipartisan delegation to Alabama for the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
“My hope is that the bipartisan efforts we’ve made will move people to recommit themselves to restore the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act,” Sewell says. “Gold medals are great—I think it’s long overdue and much deserved that the foot soldiers are going to finally get their place in history, but the biggest tribute that we can give to those foot soldiers is fully restoring the Voting Rights Act.”
Selma transformed America. It’s time for America to repay that debt.
Civil rights activists arriving in Montgomery, Ala., on March 25, 1965, at the end of a Selma-to-Montgomery protest march. Credit Agence France-Presse
By HANK SANDERS and FAYA ROSE TOURE MARCH 6, 2015
SELMA, Ala. — The memory is as powerful as if it were yesterday. On March 25, 1965, tens of thousands of us gathered before the Alabama State Capitol, the endpoint of a five-day, 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called out, “How long?” and the crowd responded, “Not long!” The moment was electric. We believed it would not be long before the right to vote was deeply rooted and bearing fruit in America.
In one sense, we were right. The Voting Rights Act, passed just months after the Selma marches, banned the discriminatory voting practices that many southern states had enacted following the Civil War. Over time, the Act enabled millions of African-Americans to register to vote, and for decades following its passage, voting rights continued to slowly expand. But in another sense we are still waiting. Either Dr. King was wrong or “not long” is biblical, measured in generations.
We came to Selma in 1971, newly married and fresh out of Harvard Law School. Our intentions were to stay for five years. We were sure that by then Dr. King’s vision of voting rights would have been realized. Over 40 years later, not only are the fruits scarce, but the roots are shallow and feeble.
Celebrations, commemorations and movies make people feel good, but the reality is that voting rights have been rolled back dramatically in recent years. The Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act, striking down a central provision requiring certain states, including Alabama, to obtain federal clearance before changing voting procedures. Since then, several states have limited access to voting by blacks and others. Today, all Alabama voters must show photo identification. In Alabama and other states, this I.D. must be government-issued. These policies, which disproportionately affect minority, poor and elderly voters who are less likely to possess government-issued I.D.s, are the 21st-century equivalent of the Jim Crow-era poll tax and literacy test.
Dr. King understood that voting would be the last right granted to African-Americans because it was the most powerful. Indeed, if we had better understood our history, we would not have been surprised that “not long” has stretched into a half-century. We did not remember that, though the 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote in 1870, Congress in 1894 repealed legislation enacted in 1870 and 1871 that provided robust and necessary enforcements of that right. In a sense, in 1965 we were trying to get back to where we briefly were in America in the 1870s.
But what of Selma, the worldwide symbol of voting rights and freedom?
As Dr. King urged, we marched on the ballot boxes. In 1965 there were 300 registered African-American voters and zero African-American elected officials in Dallas County, where Selma is located; in 2015 there were 19,862 registered African-American voters and 19 African-American elected officials. But we greatly underestimated the power of those who control the voting process.
It took over 35 years to dislodge Joseph T. Smitherman, who was mayor of Selma on March 7, 1965, the day known as Bloody Sunday, when lawmen disrupted the first attempted Selma-to-Montgomery march, brutally attacking peaceful demonstrators. Today most elected officials in Selma are African-American. But in Dallas County — which is about 70 percent black — whites hold six of the seven countywide elected positions. Until 2010, eight African-Americans chaired meaningful committees in the Alabama State Senate. Now we are isolated minorities without a single position of statewide influence.
Some progress has been made in the justice system, though real justice remains far removed. The Selma mayor and police chief are African-American, and Dallas County has an African-American district attorney. But black men are often held in jail for extended periods on multimillion dollar bonds, and police brutality and profiling of the poor remain far too prevalent.
In Dallas County, the number of African-Americans living at poverty level is nearly eight times that of whites. Too many African-Americans in Selma still live in substandard housing. And while the law no longer requires it, nearly all African-American children here still attend schools that are effectively segregated. Our granddaughter graduates from high school in Selma this year, and there was not one white child in any of her classes from first through 12th grade.
Despite our city’s fame as a cornerstone of the Civil Rights movement, African-Americans in Selma who dare to discuss these issues openly and honestly are called racists, haters and worse.
Yes, we marched on the ballot boxes. But for the tens of thousands of African-Americans in Selma, life, as Langston Hughes said, “ain’t been no crystal stair.” Better off is not equal.
We came to Selma over four decades ago; today we are both in our seventies. When we arrived, we agreed that every five years we would decide anew whether to stay or leave. Each time we chose to stay. The choice is coming up again next year. What shall we do? The struggle continues because the challenges remain great.
Hank Sanders has served as a member of the Alabama State Senate since 1983. Faya Rose Toure is an attorney and civil rights activist.
Why civil rights leader Diane Nash refused to march at Selma this weekend Laura Bush, second from left, and former president George W. Bush, as well as members of Congress and civil rights leaders make a symbolic walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., for the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” a landmark event of the civil rights movement on March 7, 2015.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Episode: 20072 March 9, 2015
The U.S. commemorates the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, and Congressman John Lewis reflects on the civil rights movement in his graphic novel trilogy, "March."
John Lewis Extended Interview Congressman John Lewis describes the historic events he participated in as a leader of the civil rights movement and shares his desire to inspire the next generation of activists with his graphic novel trilogy, "March." (16:04) http://thedailyshow.cc.com/extended-interviews/t0qi1l/john-lewis-extended-interview [with comments]
The world knows it as Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. But Lawrence O'Donnell says it's time to change that name. Who should it be named after instead? Lawrence explains with a moving history lesson in the Rewrite. Duration: 4:37
Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did
attribution: Wikicommons
by HamdenRice Mon Aug 29, 2011 at 08:24 AM PDT
Reposted on the anniversary of the assassination of Rev. King. MB
This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective.
The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished.
What most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That's why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind.
Head below to read about what Martin Luther King, Jr. actually did.
I remember that many years ago, when I was a smartass home from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Autobiography-Malcolm-Told-Haley/dp/0345350685 (my insert)], probably for the second time.
A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we were talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call, "peasant" origin, although he had risen solidly into the working-middle class. He was from rural Virginia and his parents had been tobacco farmers. I spent two weeks or so every summer on the farm of my grandmother and step-grandfather. They had no running water, no gas, a wood burning stove, no bathtubs or toilets but an outhouse, potbelly stoves for heat in the winter, a giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung, chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no tractor or car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse drawn implements, and electricity only after I was about 8 years old. The area did not have high schools for blacks and my father went as far as the seventh grade in a one room schoolhouse. All four of his grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had been born slaves. It was mainly because of World War II and urbanization that my father left that life.
They lived in a valley or hollow or "holler" in which all the landowners and tenants were black. In the morning if you wanted to talk to cousin Taft, you would walk down to behind the outhouse and yell across the valley, "Heeeyyyy Taaaaft," and you could see him far, far in the distance, come out of his cabin and yell back.
On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they lived in isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did have to leave the valley to go to town where all the rigid rules of Jim Crow applied. By the time I was little, my people had been in this country for six generations (going back, according to oral rendering of our genealogy, to Africa Jones and Mama Suki), much more under slavery than under freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism, which had inculcated many humiliating behavior patterns.
Anyway, that's background. I think we were kind of typical as African Americans in the pre-civil rights era went.
So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X's message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn't that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn't accomplished anything as Dr. King had.
I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his "I have a dream speech."
Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, "he marched." I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
I'm guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the midwest and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.
It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.
You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.
It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.
This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.
White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of "assault," which could be anything from rape to not taking off one's hat, to "reckless eyeballing."
This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father's memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady.
This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.
I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents' vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.
This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.
If you didn't get taught such things, let alone experience them, I caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans.
The question is, how did Dr. King do this—and of course, he didn't do it alone.
(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of nonviolent resistance, and taught the practices of nonviolent resistance.)
So what did they do?
They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.
Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.
If we do it all together, we'll be okay.
They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn't that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.
And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn't that bad.
Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?
These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.
That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era.
Please let this sink in. It wasn't marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.
So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war-like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears. So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.
That is what Dr. King did—not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives.
Once the beating was over, we were free.
It wasn't the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid. So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I admire you, you were wrong on this one. Our people freed ourselves and those Acts, as important as they were, were only white people officially recognizing what we had done.
Never Forget that Martin Luther King Jr. was Hated by White America
Chauncey DeVega Monday Jan 19, 2015 at 03:40 PM
Selma will likely replace the TV miniseries Roots or the documentary Eyes on the Prize in the obligatory Martin Luther King Jr. viewing rotation.
Selma is a fine movie. It is also a product of the culture industry and racial capitalism.
While Dr. King is praised as American royalty in post civil rights era America, he has been robbed of all of his radicalism, truth-telling, and criticism of white supremacy and white privilege, the latter constituting a deep existential and philosophical rot in the heart of the American political and civic project.
The best way to kill a revolutionary or a radical is to give him or her a monument and a public holiday. James Earl Ray murdered Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. The milquetoast version of his radical politics as processed through the white racial frame and the American myth-making machine have murdered him a second time.
Ultimately, it is easy to love a dead man.
We cannot forget that Dr. King was hated by most of White America while he was alive.
Once more and again, racism is not an opinion.
To wit.
Public opinion polling data [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/149201/Americans-Divided-Whether-King-Dream-Realized.aspx ] from the 1960s highlights the high levels of white animus towards Dr. King, and the basic claims on human rights and citizenship made by African-Americans in the long Black Freedom Struggle and the civil rights movement.
Appleton cites this data on animus towards Dr. King as measured by Gallup, here presented in its original form on the survey instrument:
While there have been great shifts in white Americans' public attitudes on race and racial equality, white animus in the form of a belief that African-Americans are "too demanding" about racism, and that black people are treated "fairly" in America, echo in the present.
The latter is bizarre: in 1968 Jim and Jane Crow was still very much alive in America, the Civil Rights Movement continued, lynchings, anti-black state violence, the KKK, and American Apartheid were not dusty memories--its victims and perpetrators were still alive...the past was not even past.
Appleton continues, highlighting the power of the white racial frame, and how whiteness and white privilege distort reality for too many White American in this summary of Gallup's data:
A 53% majority of African Americans say that blacks who don’t get ahead are mainly responsible for their situation, while just three-in-ten say discrimination is mainly to blame. As recently as the mid-1990s, black opinion on this question tilted in the opposite direction, with a majority of African Americans saying then that discrimination is the main reason for a lack of black progress.
Racial attitudes and public opinion exist along a continuum in the United States. The past echoes in the present; the present is a function of the past.
It is easy to worship and memorialize the dead Dr. King.
Moreover, going to see a movie like Selma on Dr. King's holiday is not a substantive political act.
In the era of Vaudeville postmodern politics [ http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2015/01/are-you-also-feeling-disoriented-by.html ], the central question thus becomes, how are Americans, across the colorline, using his life examples and struggle to confront (or not) the culture of cruelty, white supremacy, terrorism and torture as state policy, and police murder and thuggery against black and brown people, as well as the poor?
john lewis selma 50 speech. john lewis returned to selma 50 years later to introduce president obama at #selma50
John Lewis: ‘Still work left to be done’
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., speaks at the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma. “We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired,” he said. “We must do the work that injustice and inequality calls us to do.”
Rep. John Lewis Asks Crowd in Selma to Build on Legacy
Fifty years after being beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, U.S. Rep. John Lewis told a crowd gathered there to build on the legacy of the civil rights movement and to stand up for what they believe in.
Thousands are gathered in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary commemoration of "Bloody Sunday," when peaceful demonstrators were attacked by law enforcement during a march to Montgomery to press for equal voting rights. Lewis delivered remarks before introducing President Barack Obama.
Lewis represents part of Atlanta in the U.S. House of Representatives but is an Alabama native who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr.
Lewis said he and others returned to the bridge to be renewed, inspired and reminded of the need to work toward justice and equality
President Obama Delivers Remarks on the 50th Anniversary of the Selma Marches
Published on Mar 7, 2015 by The White House
President Obama delivers remarks from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, marking the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery.
President Obama Speaks at the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Streamed live on Mar 7, 2015 by The White House Live from Selma, Alabama. President Obama will speak at the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FWD8KkNUs0 [comments disabled; (unlisted) live stream; at least largely complete event coverage, with two segments, the first beginning at c. 1:35:40 and the second (including the Lewis and Obama speeches) beginning at c. 2:57:20] [another live stream, covering the second segment, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50eERSuuzXc (no comments yet)]
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Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches
Edmund Pettus Bridge Selma, Alabama March 07, 2015 2:17 P.M. CST
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you, President Obama!
THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know I love you back. (Applause.)
It is a rare honor in this life to follow one of your heroes. And John Lewis is one of my heroes.
Now, I have to imagine that when a younger John Lewis woke up that morning 50 years ago and made his way to Brown Chapel, heroics were not on his mind. A day like this was not on his mind. Young folks with bedrolls and backpacks were milling about. Veterans of the movement trained newcomers in the tactics of non-violence; the right way to protect yourself when attacked. A doctor described what tear gas does to the body, while marchers scribbled down instructions for contacting their loved ones. The air was thick with doubt, anticipation and fear. And they comforted themselves with the final verse of the final hymn they sung:
“No matter what may be the test, God will take care of you; Lean, weary one, upon His breast, God will take care of you.”
And then, his knapsack stocked with an apple, a toothbrush, and a book on government -- all you need for a night behind bars -- John Lewis led them out of the church on a mission to change America.
President and Mrs. Bush, Governor Bentley, Mayor Evans, Sewell, Reverend Strong, members of Congress, elected officials, foot soldiers, friends, fellow Americans:
As John noted, there are places and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided. Many are sites of war -- Concord and Lexington, Appomattox, Gettysburg. Others are sites that symbolize the daring of America’s character -- Independence Hall and Seneca Falls, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral.
Selma is such a place. In one afternoon 50 years ago, so much of our turbulent history -- the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war; the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow; the death of four little girls in Birmingham; and the dream of a Baptist preacher -- all that history met on this bridge.
It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the true meaning of America. And because of men and women like John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton, Diane Nash, Ralph Abernathy, C.T. Vivian, Andrew Young, Fred Shuttlesworth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others, the idea of a just America and a fair America, an inclusive America, and a generous America -- that idea ultimately triumphed.
As is true across the landscape of American history, we cannot examine this moment in isolation. The march on Selma was part of a broader campaign that spanned generations; the leaders that day part of a long line of heroes.
We gather here to celebrate them. We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching towards justice.
They did as Scripture instructed: “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” And in the days to come, they went back again and again. When the trumpet call sounded for more to join, the people came –- black and white, young and old, Christian and Jew, waving the American flag and singing the same anthems full of faith and hope. A white newsman, Bill Plante, who covered the marches then and who is with us here today, quipped that the growing number of white people lowered the quality of the singing. (Laughter.) To those who marched, though, those old gospel songs must have never sounded so sweet.
In time, their chorus would well up and reach President Johnson. And he would send them protection, and speak to the nation, echoing their call for America and the world to hear: “We shall overcome.” (Applause.) What enormous faith these men and women had. Faith in God, but also faith in America.
The Americans who crossed this bridge, they were not physically imposing. But they gave courage to millions. They held no elected office. But they led a nation. They marched as Americans who had endured hundreds of years of brutal violence, countless daily indignities –- but they didn’t seek special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them almost a century before. (Applause.)
What they did here will reverberate through the ages. Not because the change they won was preordained; not because their victory was complete; but because they proved that nonviolent change is possible, that love and hope can conquer hate.
As we commemorate their achievement, we are well-served to remember that at the time of the marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them. Back then, they were called Communists, or half-breeds, or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse –- they were called everything but the name their parents gave them. Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism challenged.
And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place? (Applause.) What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people –- unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course?
What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals? (Applause.)
That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: “We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” (Applause.)
These are not just words. They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny. For founders like Franklin and Jefferson, for leaders like Lincoln and FDR, the success of our experiment in self-government rested on engaging all of our citizens in this work. And that’s what we celebrate here in Selma. That’s what this movement was all about, one leg in our long journey toward freedom. (Applause.)
The American instinct that led these young men and women to pick up the torch and cross this bridge, that’s the same instinct that moved patriots to choose revolution over tyranny. It’s the same instinct that drew immigrants from across oceans and the Rio Grande; the same instinct that led women to reach for the ballot, workers to organize against an unjust status quo; the same instinct that led us to plant a flag at Iwo Jima and on the surface of the Moon. (Applause.)
It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America. (Applause.)
That’s what makes us unique. That’s what cements our reputation as a beacon of opportunity. Young people behind the Iron Curtain would see Selma and eventually tear down that wall. Young people in Soweto would hear Bobby Kennedy talk about ripples of hope and eventually banish the scourge of apartheid. Young people in Burma went to prison rather than submit to military rule. They saw what John Lewis had done. From the streets of Tunis to the Maidan in Ukraine, this generation of young people can draw strength from this place, where the powerless could change the world’s greatest power and push their leaders to expand the boundaries of freedom.
They saw that idea made real right here in Selma, Alabama. They saw that idea manifest itself here in America.
Because of campaigns like this, a Voting Rights Act was passed. Political and economic and social barriers came down. And the change these men and women wrought is visible here today in the presence of African Americans who run boardrooms, who sit on the bench, who serve in elected office from small towns to big cities; from the Congressional Black Caucus all the way to the Oval Office. (Applause.)
Because of what they did, the doors of opportunity swung open not just for black folks, but for every American. Women marched through those doors. Latinos marched through those doors. Asian Americans, gay Americans, Americans with disabilities -- they all came through those doors. (Applause.) Their endeavors gave the entire South the chance to rise again, not by reasserting the past, but by transcending the past.
What a glorious thing, Dr. King might say. And what a solemn debt we owe. Which leads us to ask, just how might we repay that debt?
First and foremost, we have to recognize that one day’s commemoration, no matter how special, is not enough. If Selma taught us anything, it’s that our work is never done. (Applause.) The American experiment in self-government gives work and purpose to each generation.
Selma teaches us, as well, that action requires that we shed our cynicism. For when it comes to the pursuit of justice, we can afford neither complacency nor despair.
Just this week, I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country. And I understood the question; the report’s narrative was sadly familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or by custom. And before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was. (Applause.)
We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress -– our progress –- would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.
Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that Ferguson is an isolated incident; that racism is banished; that the work that drew men and women to Selma is now complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the “race card” for their own purposes. We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true. We just need to open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.
We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won. We know that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged, all of us, by the content of our character requires admitting as much, facing up to the truth. “We are capable of bearing a great burden,” James Baldwin once wrote, “once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”
There’s nothing America can’t handle if we actually look squarely at the problem. And this is work for all Americans, not just some. Not just whites. Not just blacks. If we want to honor the courage of those who marched that day, then all of us are called to possess their moral imagination. All of us will need to feel as they did the fierce urgency of now. All of us need to recognize as they did that change depends on our actions, on our attitudes, the things we teach our children. And if we make such an effort, no matter how hard it may sometimes seem, laws can be passed, and consciences can be stirred, and consensus can be built. (Applause.)
With such an effort, we can make sure our criminal justice system serves all and not just some. Together, we can raise the level of mutual trust that policing is built on –- the idea that police officers are members of the community they risk their lives to protect, and citizens in Ferguson and New York and Cleveland, they just want the same thing young people here marched for 50 years ago -– the protection of the law. (Applause.) Together, we can address unfair sentencing and overcrowded prisons, and the stunted circumstances that rob too many boys of the chance to become men, and rob the nation of too many men who could be good dads, and good workers, and good neighbors. (Applause.)
With effort, we can roll back poverty and the roadblocks to opportunity. Americans don’t accept a free ride for anybody, nor do we believe in equality of outcomes. But we do expect equal opportunity. And if we really mean it, if we’re not just giving lip service to it, but if we really mean it and are willing to sacrifice for it, then, yes, we can make sure every child gets an education suitable to this new century, one that expands imaginations and lifts sights and gives those children the skills they need. We can make sure every person willing to work has the dignity of a job, and a fair wage, and a real voice, and sturdier rungs on that ladder into the middle class.
And with effort, we can protect the foundation stone of our democracy for which so many marched across this bridge –- and that is the right to vote. (Applause.) Right now, in 2015, 50 years after Selma, there are laws across this country designed to make it harder for people to vote. As we speak, more of such laws are being proposed. Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Act, the culmination of so much blood, so much sweat and tears, the product of so much sacrifice in the face of wanton violence, the Voting Rights Act stands weakened, its future subject to political rancor.
How can that be? The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowning achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic efforts. (Applause.) President Reagan signed its renewal when he was in office. President George W. Bush signed its renewal when he was in office. (Applause.) One hundred members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right to protect it. If we want to honor this day, let that hundred go back to Washington and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore that law this year. That’s how we honor those on this bridge. (Applause.)
Of course, our democracy is not the task of Congress alone, or the courts alone, or even the President alone. If every new voter-suppression law was struck down today, we would still have, here in America, one of the lowest voting rates among free peoples. Fifty years ago, registering to vote here in Selma and much of the South meant guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, the number of bubbles on a bar of soap. It meant risking your dignity, and sometimes, your life.
What’s our excuse today for not voting? How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought? (Applause.) How do we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future? Why are we pointing to somebody else when we could take the time just to go to the polling places? (Applause.) We give away our power.
Fellow marchers, so much has changed in 50 years. We have endured war and we’ve fashioned peace. We’ve seen technological wonders that touch every aspect of our lives. We take for granted conveniences that our parents could have scarcely imagined. But what has not changed is the imperative of citizenship; that willingness of a 26-year-old deacon, or a Unitarian minister, or a young mother of five to decide they loved this country so much that they’d risk everything to realize its promise.
That’s what it means to love America. That’s what it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional.
For we were born of change. We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. We secure our rights and responsibilities through a system of self-government, of and by and for the people. That’s why we argue and fight with so much passion and conviction -- because we know our efforts matter. We know America is what we make of it.
Look at our history. We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. That’s our spirit. That’s who we are.
We are Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer, women who could do as much as any man and then some. And we’re Susan B. Anthony, who shook the system until the law reflected that truth. That is our character.
We’re the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free –- Holocaust survivors, Soviet defectors, the Lost Boys of Sudan. We’re the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life. That’s how we came to be. (Applause.)
We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. (Applause.) We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened up the West, and countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights.
We’re the fresh-faced GIs who fought to liberate a continent. And we’re the Tuskeegee Airmen, and the Navajo code-talkers, and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied.
We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge. (Applause.)
We are storytellers, writers, poets, artists who abhor unfairness, and despise hypocrisy, and give voice to the voiceless, and tell truths that need to be told.
We’re the inventors of gospel and jazz and blues, bluegrass and country, and hip-hop and rock and roll, and our very own sound with all the sweet sorrow and reckless joy of freedom.
We are Jackie Robinson, enduring scorn and spiked cleats and pitches coming straight to his head, and stealing home in the World Series anyway. (Applause.)
We are the people Langston Hughes wrote of who “build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how.” We are the people Emerson wrote of, “who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long;” who are “never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”
That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. (Applause.) We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit. That’s why someone like John Lewis at the ripe old age of 25 could lead a mighty march.
And that’s what the young people here today and listening all across the country must take away from this day. You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, because you’re ready to seize what ought to be.
For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there’s new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. And it is you, the young and fearless at heart, the most diverse and educated generation in our history, who the nation is waiting to follow.
Because Selma shows us that America is not the project of any one person. Because the single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” “We The People.” “We Shall Overcome.” “Yes We Can.” (Applause.) That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given, to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.
Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer. Two hundred and thirty-nine years after this nation’s founding our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer. Our job’s easier because somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us over that bridge. When it feels the road is too hard, when the torch we’ve been passed feels too heavy, we will remember these early travelers, and draw strength from their example, and hold firmly the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on [the] wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint.” (Applause.)
We honor those who walked so we could run. We must run so our children soar. And we will not grow weary. For we believe in the power of an awesome God, and we believe in this country’s sacred promise.
May He bless those warriors of justice no longer with us, and bless the United States of America. Thank you, everybody. (Applause.)
As our van in the presidential motorcade reached the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and began the descent toward the thousands of waiting faces and waving arms of those who had come to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the gravity of that place seized me, pushing out the breath and rousing the wonder.
The mind imagines the horror of that distant day: the scrum of bodies and the cloud of gas, the coughing and trampling, the screaming and wailing, the batons colliding with bones, the opening of flesh, the running down of blood.
In that moment I understood what was necessary in President Obama’s address: to balance celebration and solemnity, to honor the heroes of the past but also to motivate the activists of the moment, to acknowledge how much work had been done but to remind the nation that that work was not complete.
(I, along with a small group of other journalists, had been invited by the White House to accompany the president to Selma and have a discussion with him during the flight there.)
About an hour north of where the president spoke was Shelby County, whose suit against the Department of Justice the Supreme Court had used to gut the same Voting Rights Act [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html ] that Bloody Sunday helped to pass.
His speech also came after several shootings of unarmed black men, whose deaths caused national protests and racial soul-searching.
It came on the heels of the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, Mo., which found pervasive racial bias and an oppressive use of fines primarily against African-Americans.
The president had to bend the past around so it pointed toward the future. To a large degree, he accomplished that goal. The speech was emotional and evocative. People cheered. Some cried.
And yet there seemed to me something else in the air: a lingering — or gathering — sense of sadness, a frustration born out of perpetual incompletion, an anger engendered by the threat of regression, a pessimism about a present and future riven by worsening racial understanding and interplay.
To truly understand the Bloody Sunday inflection point — and the civil rights movement as a whole — one must appreciate the preceding century.
After the Civil War, blacks were incredibly populous in Southern states. They were close to, or exceeded, half the population in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina.
During Reconstruction, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were ratified, abolishing slavery, granting citizenship and equal protection to former slaves and extending the vote to black men. As a result, “some 2,000 African-Americans held public office, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate,” according to the television channel History.
This was an assault on the traditional holders of power in the South, who responded aggressively. The structure of Jim Crow began to form. The Ku Klux Klan was born, whose tactics would put the current Islamic State to shame.
Then in the early 20th century came the first wave of the Great Migration, in which millions of Southern blacks would decamp for the North, East and West.
This left a smaller black population in Southern states that had developed and perfected a system to keep those who remained suppressed and separate.
Here, the civil rights movement and Bloody Sunday played out.
The movement was about justice and equality, but in a way it was also about power — the renewed fear of diminished power, the threat of expanded power, the longing for denied power.
Now, we must look at the hundred years following the movement to understand that another inflection point is coming, one that again threatens traditional power: the browning of America.
In response, fear and restrictive laws are creeping back into our culture and our politics — not always explicitly or violently, but in ways whose effects are similarly racially arrayed. Structural inequities — economic, educational — are becoming more rigid, and systemic biases harder to eradicate. But this time the threat isn’t regional and racially binary but national and multifaceted.
Why Malcolm X’s image as a separatist lives on, 50 years after his death
Civil rights activist Malcolm X in an undated photo. Religion News Service file photo
“More violence on the racial scene in 1964 than Americans have ever witnessed” was predicted in New York by Malcolm X, a militant nationalist who broke with the Black Muslim movement headed by Elijah Muhammad to form his own organization, Muslim Mosque, Inc. Religion News Service file photo
Susanne Cervenka / USA Today February 17, 2015
(RNS) Rodnell Collins stood next to his uncle, Malcolm X, as the latter stared thoughtfully at Plymouth Rock during a visit to Massachusetts when Collins was a child.
It wasn’t until years later that Collins, the son of Malcolm’s sister, Ella Little Collins, would learn what his uncle was thinking: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us.”
Malcolm X, the African-American nationalist leader and onetime minister of the Nation of Islam who was assassinated 50 years ago Feb. 21, inspired countless people with the frank and uncompromising way he spoke about race relations in America. And much of what he said about the experiences of black Americans remains true today, experts say.
Yet, while other civil rights leaders of the 1950s and ’60s are more broadly celebrated as American heroes, the fire with which Malcolm X spoke still overpowers the words he was saying.
“With the exception of the hip-hop generation, with the exception of urban African Americans, his legacy has been tarnished as having done very little and having been part of a vision of America that is anti-American,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, executive director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, which holds writings and personal memorabilia of Malcolm X.
Born in 1925 as Malcolm Little, he became a Muslim and a member of the Nation of Islam while serving time in prison for burglary. He dropped his surname, saying it was a slave name.
Malcolm X drew thousands of followers to the Nation of Islam with his charisma and oratory that admirers say shined a light on disadvantages for blacks in terms of poverty, education, police brutality and residential segregation.
Detractors labeled him as “militant,” saying he preached violence and racism because of his early-career rhetoric declaring whites the enemy. At one point shortly before his death, Malcolm X wanted to bring charges against the United States at the United Nations, alleging human rights violations against black Americans.
But Malcolm X demanded liberty and freedoms not just for black Americans, but for all humans, Collins says. “His legacy is the testimony of what one can strive and do for the liberty of others,” he said.
Collins said his uncle was not urging blacks to act as aggressors. Rather, he was telling them they had a right to defend themselves against lynchings and other violence perpetrated by whites.
In a sense, Malcolm X was considered militant because he had a much more radical critique than other activists of the time, Muhammad said.
And that more radical position, Muhammad said, gave Martin Luther King Jr. and his political allies more of a middle ground from which to campaign for civil rights.
“He’s still the foil to Dr. King,” he said. “He still plays the bad guy and the one who did not have a vision of a universal brotherhood.”
But Malcolm X and King moved closer together in terms of their visions as their lives progressed. Malcolm X shifted away from his separatist views after a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964. He embraced a more universal vision of brotherhood, similar to one King espoused, Muhammad said. King, meanwhile, focused more broadly on human rights issues Malcolm X had pushed.
Had both men lived past 39, experts say Malcolm X and King likely would have had a meeting of the minds and would have provided greater focus on advances for blacks beyond basic civil rights.
“I think black Americans would have had a more unified answer to King’s last question of ‘Where do we go from here?’ ” said Clayborne Carson, founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
Collins said Americans shouldn’t just think of Malcolm X as a firebrand but should be inspired by him to understand and be vigilant about liberties for all.
“We have to be a community and not just a community of one. We have to be a community of all and everyone. Not just black, not just white,” he said. “Skin color is not who you are. It’s your consciousness.”
(Cervenka also reports for the Asbury (N.J.) Park Press)
We have just marked the 49th anniversary of the martyrdom of Malcolm X, the iconic civil rights leader. Malcolm was killed on February 21, 1965 in Harlem. Malcolm was 39, ironically the same age as Dr. King when he was killed. The two stand as the two most iconic pillars of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and were intimately linked with one another.
Brother Malcolm, also known by his Muslim name (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X ]) was a powerful leader of the radical black tradition whose own transition from the Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad to Sunni Islam prefigured the later mass conversion of tens of thousands of Nation of Islam members.
Brother Malcolm, whom a leading American Muslim scholar (Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah) calls “The Imam Malik of New York”, is largely written out of the National African American history month celebration. Students are even prohibited from writing papers on him.
Still, it seems worthwhile to look at some of Malcolm’s pithy and provocative statements.
In some ways, the best thing that happened to popularizing Malcolm was Spike Lee’s movie. And if one may excuse the observation, Spike’s movie also stands as one of the major obstacles to learning about the fullness of Malcolm’s radical commitment. It is always good to get back to Malcolm’s own powerful speeches.
One should not confuse reading quotes about Malcolm with walking in his footsteps. It is an easy task to pick a few of Malcolm’s powerful quotes, entirely another to walk in his footsteps. But Malcolm himself emphasized the importance of education. He often noted how speaking in college settings was one of his favorite activities. And Malcolm constantly preached that unless we truly knew our own truth, we were bound to remain bonded to tyranny. So in light of Brother Malcolm, here are a number of his teachings [ https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/17435.Malcolm_X ]:
Malcolm on patriotism: “You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”
Malcolm on truth: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
Malcolm on the power of education: “People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”
Malcolm on self-defense: “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”
Malcolm on capitalism: “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker”
Malcolm on liberation: “Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”
Malcolm on the power of corporate media: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Malcolm on America: “I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream — I see an American nightmare.”
Malcolm on brotherhood: “I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment”
Malcolm on Islam [ http://www.malcolm-x.org/quotes.htm ]: “America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.”
Malcolm on black unity [ http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-declaration-of-independence/ ]: “There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity. There can be no workers’ solidarity until there is first some racial solidarity. We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves. We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves. One can’t unite bananas with scattered leaves.”
Malcolm on the need to alter our narrative of America [ http://www.panafricanperspective.com/mxoaaufounding.html ]: “We are African, and we happened to be in America. We’re not American. We are people who formerly were Africans who were kidnapped and brought to America. Our forefathers weren’t the Pilgrims [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_Fathers ]. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Rock ]. The rock was landed on us. We were brought here against our will. We were not brought here to be made citizens. We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today.”
Malcolm on the connection between American racism and colonialism [ http://www.malcolm-x.org/speeches/spc_021465.htm ]: “But despite the fact that I saw that Islam was a religion of brotherhood, I also had to face reality. And when I got back into this American society, I’m not in a society that practices brotherhood… And so, since I could see that America itself is a society where there is no brotherhood and that this society is controlled primarily by racists and segregationists — and it is — who are in Washington, D.C., in positions of power. And from Washington, D.C., they exercise the same forms of brutal oppression against dark-skinned people in South and North Vietnam, or in the Congo, or in Cuba, or in any other place on this earth where they’re trying to exploit and oppress. This is a society whose government doesn’t hesitate to inflict the most brutal form of punishment and oppression upon dark-skinned people all over the world…” - Malcolm X, Feb 14, 1965, Ford Auditorium, Detroit
WHEN MY MOTHER was 12, she walked from the projects of West Baltimore to the beauty shop at North Avenue and Druid Hill, and for the first time in her life, was relaxed. It was 1962. Black, bespectacled, skinny, and buck-toothed, Ma was also considered to have the worst head of hair in her family. Her tales of home cosmetology are surreal. They feature a hot metal comb, the kitchen stove, my grandmother, much sizzling, the occasional nervous flinch, and screaming and scabbing.
In the ongoing quest for the locks of Lena Horne, a chemical relaxer was an agent of perfection. It held longer than hot combs, and with more aggression—virtually every strand could be subdued, and would remain so for weeks. Relying on chemistry instead of torque and heat, the relaxer seemed more worldly, more civilized and refined.
That day, the hairdresser donned rubber gloves, applied petroleum jelly to protect Ma’s scalp, stroked in a clump of lye, and told my mother to hold on for as long as she could bear. Ma endured this ritual every three to four weeks for the rest of her childhood. Sometimes, the beautician would grow careless with the jelly, and Ma’s scalp would simmer for days. But on the long walk home, black boys would turn, gawk, and smile at my mother’s hair made good.
Ma went off to college, leaving the house of my grandmother, a onetime domestic from Maryland’s Eastern Shore who had studied nursing in night school and owned her own home. This was 1969. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead. Baltimore had exploded in riots. Ma hung a poster of Huey Newton in her dorm room. She donated clothes at the Baltimore office of the Black Panthers. There, she met my father, a dissident of strong opinions, modest pedigree, and ill repute. In the eyes of my grandmother, their entanglement was heretical, a rejection of the workhorse ethos of colored people, which had lifted my grandmother out of the projects and delivered her kids to college. The impiety was summed up in a final preposterous act that a decade earlier would have been inconceivable—my mother, at 20, let her relaxer grow out, and cultivated her own natural, nappy hair.
The community of my youth was populated by women of similar ilk. They wore their hair in manifold ways—dreadlocks and Nubian twists, Afros as wide as planets or low and tapered from the temple. They braided it, invested it with beads and yarn, pulled the whole of it back into a crown, or wrapped it in yards of African fabric. But in a rejection aimed at something greater than follicles and roots, all of them repudiated straighteners.
The women belonged, as did I, to a particular tribe of America, one holding that we, as black people, were born to a country that hated us and that at all turns plotted our fall. A nation built on immigrants and a professed eclecticism made its views of us manifest through blackface, Little Sambo, and Tarzan of the Apes. Its historians held that Africa was a cannibal continent. Its pundits argued that we should be happy for our enslavement. Its uniformed thugs beat us in Selma and shot us down in northern streets. So potent was this hate that even we, the despised, were enlisted into its cause. So we bleached our skin, jobbed our noses, and relaxed our hair.
To reject hatred, to awaken to the ugly around us and the original beauty within, to be aware, to be “conscious,” as we dubbed ourselves, was to reject the agents of deceit—their religion, their culture, their names. To be conscious was to celebrate the self, to cast blackness in all its manifestations as a blessing. Kinky hair and full lips were the height of beauty. Their bearers were the progeny, not of slaves, but of kidnapped kings of Africa, cradle of all humanity. Old customs were found, new ones pulled out of the air. Kwanzaa for “Christmas,” Kojo for “Peter,” and jambo for “hello.” Conscious sects sprang up—some praising the creator sky god Damballah, some spouting Hebrew, and still others talking in Akan. Consciousness was inchoate and unorthodox—it made my father a vegetarian, but never moved him to wear dreadlocks or adopt an African name. What united us all was the hope of rebirth, of a serum to cure generational shame. What united us was our champion, who delivered us from self-hatred, who delivered my mother from burning lye, who was slaughtered high up in Harlem so that colored people could color themselves anew.
IN HIS LIFETIME, Malcolm X covered so much ground that now, 46 years after his murder, cross-sections of this country—well beyond the conscious advocates of my youth—still fight over his footprints. What shall we make of a man who went from thoughtless criminal to militant ascetic; from indignant racist to insurgent humanist; who could be dogmatically religious one moment, and then broadly open-minded the next; who in the last year of his life espoused capitalism and socialism, leaving both conservatives and communists struggling to lay their claims?
Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.
For virtually all of my sentient life, I have carried some talisman of Malcolm—key chain, audiotape, or T-shirt. I came of age not just among the black and conscious, but among that slice of the hip-hop generation that witnessed Malcolm X’s revival in the late 1980s and early ’90s, bracketed by the rapper KRS-One’s appropriation of Malcolm’s famous pose by the window and Spike Lee’s sprawling biopic. For those who’d grown up in hardscrabble inner cities, Malcolm X offered the promise of transcending the street. For those who’d been the only black kids in their classes, Malcolm’s early and troubled interactions with his own white classmates provided comfort. For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective. When I first lived alone, at the age of 20, I purchased a giant black-and-white poster of Malcolm with the phrase No Sellout! scrawled at the top.
But my life grew in ways that did not adhere to slogans. Raised in de facto segregation, I was carried by my work into the mostly white world, and then to the blasphemies of having white friends and howling white music. In 2004, I moved to Malcolm’s adopted home of Harlem, and though I occasionally marveled at Malcolm’s old mosque at 116th and Lenox, or the YMCA where he roomed as an aspiring Harlem hustler, my years there passed without note. I declined to hang my giant Malcolm poster in my new digs, stuffing him and all my conscious days in the closet.
I spent Election Night 2008 with my partner and our son, at the home of two dear friends and their young son. That they were an interracial couple is both beside the point, and the point itself. By then, my friends were so varied in hue, and more varied still in their pairings, that I’d stopped thinking in ways I once took as elemental. I joined in the spectacle of America—a country that had incorporated the fact of African slavery into its Constitution—handing its standard to a black man of thin résumé and fantastical mien.
And the next day, I saw black people smiling. And some conscious part of me died with their smiles. I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?
The opportunity for crowing was not missed. Writing three weeks after the election in the New York Daily News, Stanley Crouch, the pugilist and contrarian who’d earlier argued that Obama was not black, dismissed Malcolm X as “one of the naysayers to American possibility whose vision was permanently crushed beneath the heel of Obama’s victory on Nov. 4.” Last year, offering up on The New Republic’s Web site a listicle of those whose impact on black people he wished he could erase, John McWhorter gave Malcolm X the top spot.
But from the shadows, still he looms. Bull Connor’s world fell as the fortunes of Barack Obama rose. Yet its collapse was not assured until November of 2008. Now I see its amazing doom in ways both absurd and replete—Will Smith’s conquest of cinema, his son as the new Karate Kid, the wild utterings of Michael Steele, the kids holding out for Lauryn Hill’s mythical return. As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.
IN THE SPRING of 1950, the Springfield Union, in Massachusetts, ran the following headline: “Local Criminals, in Prison, Claim Moslem Faith Now: Grow Beards, Won’t Eat Pork, Demand East-Facing Cells to Facilitate ‘Prayers to Allah.’” The leader of the protest was an incarcerated and recently converted Malcolm X. Having converted several other prisoners, Malcolm began lobbying the warden for cells and food befitting his band’s religious beliefs. He threatened to write the Egyptian consulate in protest. Prison cooks retaliated by serving Malcolm’s food with utensils they’d used to prepare pork. Malcolm countered by spending his last two years in prison on a diet of bread and cheese.
The incident, as recounted in Manning Marable’s new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention [ http://www.amazon.com/Malcolm-X-A-Life-Reinvention/dp/0143120328 ], set the stage for Malcolm’s political career, his split from the Nation of Islam, and ultimately the course of action that led to his death. The goal of his prison protest was to advance the kind of inner reform that first drew Malcolm to the Nation, with thousands to follow. But Malcolm’s methods were protest and agitation, tools that the Nation rejected.
Unlike Bruce Perry’s 1991 biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America [ http://www.amazon.com/Malcolm-Life-Changed-Black-America/dp/0882681214 ], which entertained the most outlandish stories in an attempt to present a comprehensive portrait, Marable’s biography judiciously sifts fact from myth. Marable’s Malcolm is trapped in an unhappy marriage, cuckolded by his wife and one of his lieutenants. His indignation at Elijah Muhammad’s womanizing is fueled by his morals, and by his resentment that one of the women involved is an old flame. He can be impatient and petulant. And his behavior, in his last days, casts a shadow over his reputation as an ascetic. He is at times anti-Semitic, sexist, and, without the structure of the Nation, inefficient.
Still, the broad strokes of Malcolm’s life—the family terrorized by white supremacists, the murdered father, the turn from criminal to race man—remain intact, and Marable’s book is at its best in drawing out its subject’s shifting politics. Marable reveals Malcolm to be, in many ways, an awkward fit for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad’s Nation combined the black separatism of Marcus Garvey with Booker T. Washington’s disdain for protest. In practice, its members were conservative, stressing moral reform, individual uplift, and entrepreneurship. Malcolm was equally devoted to reform, but he believed that true reform ultimately had radical implications.
Coming out of prison, Malcolm was shocked by the small membership of the Nation, which was seriously active only in Chicago and Detroit. He soon became the sect’s most effective recruiter, organizing or reinvigorating mosques in Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, and New York. That dynamism was not confined to growing the Nation, but aimed to make it a force in the civil-rights movement.
His energy left him with a sprawling web of ties, ranging from the deeply personal (Louis Farrakhan) to the deeply cynical (George Lincoln Rockwell). He allied with A. Philip Randolph and Fannie Lou Hamer, romanced the Saudi royal family, and effectively transformed himself into black America’s ambassador to the developing world.
It is tempting to say that Malcolm’s politics did not age particularly well. Even after rejecting black supremacy, Malcolm was deeply skeptical of white America and believed its intentions could best be divined from the actions of its zealots. Malcolm had little patience for the politicking of moderates and preferred stark choices. A Manichean worldview extends from his days denouncing whites as devils up through his more nuanced speeches like “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
But Marable complicates the case for firmly fixing Malcolm’s ideology, by recounting how, as Malcolm tried to move away from Nation dogma, the sect made a concerted effort to rein him in. Officials demanded that Malcolm and the other ministers tape all their lectures and submit them for approval, to make sure they were pushing Nation ideology as opposed to political appeals on behalf of a broader black America. They repeatedly reprimanded him for going off-script, including, finally, when he seemed to revel in John F. Kennedy’s murder. Muhammad’s subsequent response suspending Malcolm reveals much about the group’s aims and politics: “The president of the country is our president too.”
To Marable’s credit, he does not judge Malcolm’s significance by his seeming failure to forge a coherent philosophy. As Malcolm traveled to Africa and the Middle East, as he debated at Oxford and Harvard, he encountered a torrent of new ideas, new ways of thinking that batted him back and forth. He never fully gave up his cynical take on white Americans, but he did broaden his views, endorsing interracial marriage and ruing the personal coldness he’d shown toward whites. Yet Malcolm’s political vision was never complete like that of Martin Luther King, who hewed faithfully to his central principle, the one he is known for today—his commitment to nonviolence.
For all of Malcolm’s prodigious intellect, he was ultimately more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain. Malcolm was the voice of a black America whose parents had borne the slights of second-class citizenship, who had seen protesters beaten by cops and bitten by dogs, and children bombed in churches, and could only sit at home and stew. He preferred to illuminate the bitter calculus of oppression, one in which a people had been forced to hand over their right to self-defense, a right enshrined in Western law and morality and taken as essential to American citizenship, in return for the civil rights that they had been promised a century earlier. The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute—the civil-rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. “I committed to nonviolence,” Marable quotes him as saying. “But I’m sort of embarrassed by it.”
BUT THE ENDURING appeal of Malcolm’s message, the portion that reaches out from the Audubon Ballroom to the South Lawn, asserts the right of a people to protect and improve themselves by their own hand. In Malcolm’s time, that message rejected the surrender of the right to secure your own body. But it also rejected black criminals’ preying on black innocents. And, perhaps most significantly, it rejected the beauty standard of others and erected a new one. In a 1962 rally, Malcolm said:
Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?
The implicit jab was not at some specific white person, but at a systemic force that compelled black people toward self-loathing. To my mother, a poor black girl, Malcolm X said, “It’s okay. And you’re okay.” To embrace Malcolm X was to be okay, it was to be relieved of the mythical curse of Ham, and reborn as a full human being.
Virtually all of black America has been, in some shape or form, touched by that rebirth. Before Malcolm X, the very handle we now embrace—black—was an insult. We were coloreds or Negroes, and to call someone “black” was to invite a fistfight. But Malcolm remade the menace inherent in that name into something mystical—Black Power; Black Is Beautiful; It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.
Hip-hop, with its focus on the assertion of self, the freedom to be who you are, and entrepreneurship, is an obvious child of black consciousness. One of the most popular music forms today, it is also the first form of pop music truly to bear the imprint of post-’60s America, with a fan base that is young and integrated. Indeed, the coalition of youth that helped Barack Obama ride to the presidency was first assembled by hip-hop record execs. And the stars that the music has produced wear their hair however they please.
For all of Malcolm’s invective, his most seductive notion was that of collective self-creation: the idea that black people could, through force of will, remake themselves. Toward the end of his book, Marable tells the story of Gerry Fulcher, a white police officer, who—almost against his will—fell under Malcolm’s sway. Assigned to wiretap Malcolm’s phone, Fulcher believed Malcolm to be “one of the bad guys,” interested in killing cops and overthrowing the government. But his views changed. “What I heard was nothing like I expected,” said Fulcher. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Let’s see, he’s right about that … He wants [blacks] to get jobs. He wants them to get education. He wants them to get into the system. What’s wrong with that?’” For black people who were never given much of an opportunity to create themselves apart from a mass image of shufflers and mammies, that vision had compelling appeal.
What gave it added valence was Malcolm’s own story, his incandescent transformation from an amoral wanderer to a hyper-moral zealot. “He had a brilliant mind. He was disciplined,” Louis Farrakhan said in a speech in 1990, and went on:
I never saw Malcolm smoke. I never saw Malcolm take a drink ... He ate one meal a day. He got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to say his prayers ... I never heard Malcolm cuss. I never saw Malcolm wink at a woman Malcolm was like a clock.
Farrakhan’s sentiments are echoed by an FBI informant, one of many who, by the late 1950s, had infiltrated the Nation of Islam at the highest levels:
Brother Malcolm … is an expert organizer and an untiring worker … He is fearless and cannot be intimidated … He has most of the answers at his fingertips and should be carefully dealt with. He is not likely to violate any ordinances or laws. He neither smokes nor drinks and is of high moral character.
In fact, Marable details how Malcolm was, by the end of his life, perhaps evolving away from his hyper-moral persona. He drinks a rum and Coke and allows himself a second meal a day. Marable suspects he carried out an affair or two, one with an 18-year-old convert to the Nation. But in the public mind, Malcolm rebirthed himself as a paragon of righteousness, and even in Marable’s retelling he is obsessed with the pursuit of self-creation. That pursuit ended when Malcolm was killed by the very Muslims from whom he once demanded fealty.
But the self-created, martially disciplined Malcolm is the man who lives on. The past 40 years have presented black America through the distorting prism of crack, crime, unemployment, and skyrocketing rates of incarceration. Some of its most prominent public faces—Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, O. J. Simpson—have in varying degrees proved themselves all too human. Against that backdrop, there is Malcolm. Tall, gaunt, and handsome, clear and direct, Malcolm was who you wanted your son to be. Malcolm was, as Joe Biden would say, clean, and he took it as his solemn, unspoken duty never to embarrass you.
Among organic black conservatives, this moral leadership still gives Malcolm sway. It’s his abiding advocacy for blackness, not as a reason for failure, but as a mandate for personal, and ultimately collective, improvement that makes him compelling. Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—“You’re better than you think you are,” he seemed to say to us. “Now act like it.”
Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our living, black manhood” and “our own black shining prince.” Only one man today could bear those twin honorifics: Barack Obama. Progressives who always enjoyed Malcolm’s thundering denunciations more than his moral appeals are unimpressed by that message. But among blacks, Obama’s moral appeals are warmly received, not because the listeners believe racism has been defeated, but because cutting off your son’s PlayStation speaks to something deep and American in black people—a belief that, by their own hand, they can be made better, they can be made anew.
Like Malcolm, Obama was a wanderer who found himself in the politics of the black community, who was rooted in a nationalist church that he ultimately outgrew. Like Malcolm’s, his speeches to black audiences are filled with exhortations to self-creation, and draw deeply from his own biography. In his memoir, Barack Obama cites Malcolm’s influence on his own life:
His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided, religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life.
Last summer, I moved from Harlem to Morningside Heights, a neighborhood around Columbia. It was the first neighborhood I’d ever lived in that was not majority black, and one of the few that could not properly be termed a “hood.” It has bars and restaurants on every corner, two different farmers’ markets, and a supermarket that’s open 24 hours and stays stocked with fresh vegetables. The neighborhood represents my new, fully cosmopolitan life.
I had spent the past two years in voracious reading about the Civil War. Repeatedly, I found myself confronting the kind of white Americans—Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Adelbert Ames—that black consciousness, with some merit, would have dismissed. And yet I found myself admiring Lincoln, despite his diatribes against Negro equality; respecting Grant, despite his once owning a slave and his advocacy of shipping African Americans out of the country. If I could see the complexity in Grant or Lincoln, what could I see in Malcolm X?
And then I thought about the luxuries that I, and black people writ large, today enjoy. In his Autobiography [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Autobiography-Malcolm-Told-Haley/dp/0345350685 ], Malcolm harks back to his time in middle school, when he was one of the top students in his school and made the mistake of telling his teacher he wanted to be a lawyer. “That’s no realistic goal for a nigger,” Malcolm’s teacher told him. Thinking back on that, Malcolm says,
My greatest lack has been, I believe, that I don’t have the kind of academic education I wish I had been able to get … I do believe that I might have made a good lawyer.
What animated Malcolm’s rage was that for all his intellect, and all his ability, and all his reinventions, as a black man in America, he found his ambitions ultimately capped. The right of self-creation had its limits then. But not anymore. Obama became a lawyer, and created himself as president, out of a single-parent home and illicit drug use.
And so it is for the more modest of us. I am, at my heart, a college dropout, twice kicked out of high school. Born out of wedlock, I, in turn, had my own son out of wedlock. But my parents do not find me blasphemous, and my mother is the first image of beauty I ever knew. Now no one questions my dark partner’s right to her natural hair. No one questions our right to self-creation. It takes a particular arrogance to fail to honor that, and instead to hold, as his most pertinent feature, the prejudices of a man whose earliest memories were of being terrorized by white supremacists, whose ambitions were dashed by actual racists, who was called “nigger” as a child so often that he thought it was his name.
When I finished unpacking my new apartment, I made one immediate change. I took my old Malcolm X poster out of the bubble wrap and affixed it to my living room’s western wall.
President Obama Speaks at the National League of Cities Conference
Published on Mar 9, 2015 by The White House
On March 9, 2015, President Obama spoke at the National League of Cities Conference on the TechHire initiative.
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Remarks by the President at the National League of Cities Conference
National League of Cities Washington, D.C. March 09, 2015 11:39 A.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you! (Applause.) Hello, mayors! Everybody have a seat. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Becker, for the wonderful introduction and the great job that you are doing every single day. Everybody have a seat. (Laughter.)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love you!
THE PRESIDENT: I love you, too. (Applause.)
It is great to be with the National League of Cities. We have about 2,000 local leaders here. We’ve got mayors, we’ve got councilmembers. We’ve got Republicans, Democrats, and independents. We’ve got some small town leaders, we’ve got some bustling city leaders. But you all have something in common, and that is that every day you wake up ready to solve problems, and you know that people are depending on you to make sure your streets are safe and your schools are strong, trash gets picked up, roads getting cleared. You have to spend time thinking in in very practical terms about whether people are getting good jobs and whether they’re able to support a family.
So you don’t have a lot of time for gridlock. You got to get the job done. You don’t have a lot of time for hot air. (Laughter.) People are expecting you to deliver. And you’re part of the reason why America is coming back. (Applause.)
Last month, our economy created nearly 300,000 new jobs. The unemployment rate ticked down to 5.5 percent, which is the lowest it’s been since the spring of 2008. And all told, businesses have now created over 12 million jobs over the last five years -- 12 million. (Applause.) And the good news is the pace has been picking up. Our businesses have now added more than 200,000 jobs a month over the last year, and we have not seen a streak like that in almost 40 years. (Applause.)
So we’re well-positioned, we’re in a good spot to take advantage of not just next year or the year after, but decades to come. And we’ve got to keep positioning ourselves for a constantly changing global economy. That’s something all of you understand. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the mayor of a big city or a small town -- you understand that the economy is dynamic now, and you can’t just stand still, you can’t rest on your laurels.
And you also understand we’ve got to stay focused on middle-class economics -- (applause) -- the notion that our country does best when everybody is getting a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share, and everybody is playing by the same set of rules. And I have to say, the National League of Cities has been a great partner in this work. A great partner. (Applause.)
We’ve worked with many of you to lift the minimum wage while we’re waiting for Congress to do something. And over the past two years, more than 20 cities and counties have taken action to raise workers’ wages. (Applause.) You’ve passed sick leave laws, you’ve answered the Mayors’ Challenge to End Veterans Homelessness. (Applause.) Nearly 200 leaders have stepped up to answer what we’re calling My Brother’s Keeper, the challenge to create more pathways to success for our young people. Some of you are supporting our efforts to secure new agreements for trade that’s free and fair in some of the world’s fastest-growing markets, because you know that there are businesses large and small in your communities that can be impacted, and we want to make sure our workers and our businesses can compete on a level playing field. (Applause.)
So there’s a lot of work we’ve done together and a lot more we can do together to make sure that more Americans benefit from a 21st century economy. And nobody knows for sure which industries are going to be generating all the good-paying jobs of the future. What we do know is we want them here in America, and we want them in your town, we want them in your cities, we want them in your counties. (Applause.) That’s what we know.
So today, I want to focus on something very specific, and that is how can we work together to build a pipeline of tech workers for this new economy. Now, this doesn’t just apply to San Francisco. This doesn’t just apply to Boston. It applies across the board in every part of the country. Right now, America has more job openings than at any point since 2001. So think of it -- (applause) -- that’s good news, we’ve got a lot of job openings. Here’s the catch: Over half a million of those jobs are technology jobs. A lot of those jobs didn’t even exist 10, 20 years ago, titles like Mobile App Developer or Userface Designer.
Now, we tend to think that all these tech jobs are in Silicon Valley, at companies like Google and eBay, or maybe in a few spots like Austin, Texas, where you’ve seen a tech industry thrive. But the truth is, two-thirds of these jobs are in non-high-tech industries like health care, or manufacturing, or banking, which means they’re in every corner of the country.
See, there’s no industry that hasn’t been touched by this technology revolution. And what’s more, a lot of these jobs don’t require a four-year degree in computer science, they don’t require you be an engineer. Folks can get the skills they need for these jobs in newer, streamlined, faster training programs.
What’s more, these tech jobs pay 50 percent more than the average private sector wage, which means they’re a ticket into the middle class. And you all know better than anybody, this is an economic development issue -- because when companies have job openings that they cannot fill, that costs them money. It costs them market share, it costs them exports. So they go looking for where they can find the people they need. And if we don’t have them, that makes it harder for us to keep and attract good jobs to our shores or to your communities.
When these jobs go unfilled, it's a missed opportunity for the workers, but it's also a missed opportunity for your city, your community, your county, your state, and our nation. And here’s something else: If we’re not producing enough tech workers, over time that’s going to threaten our leadership and global innovation, which is the bread and butter of the 21st century economy.
America is where entrepreneurs come to start the greatest startups, where the most cutting-edge ideas are born and are launched. But, historically, that’s because we’ve got great universities, we’ve got great research, and we’ve got great workers. And if we lose those assets, they’ll start drifting somewhere else, companies will get started somewhere else, and the great new industries of the future may not be here in America.
Now, I refuse to accept that future. I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that release new jobs -- (applause) -- whether it's converting sunlight into liquid fuel, or leading a new era in personalized medicine, or pushing out into the solar system, not just to visit, but to stay. We’ve got just this incredible set of opportunities, but we’ve got to have the workers for us to take advantage of it.
So, today, I’m announcing a new initiative that we’re calling TechHire. (Applause.) And it’s going to be driven by leaders like you. So there are three big components to this.
First, we already have over 20 cities, states, and rural communities, from Louisville to Delaware, who have signed on to fill tech openings -- they’ve already got more than 120,000 of them -- in bold new ways. Let me give you an example. Employers tend to recruit people with technology degrees from four-year colleges, and that means sometimes they end up screening out good candidates who don’t necessarily have traditional qualifications they may have learned at a community college or they may have served in our military. They’ve got the talent but employers are missing them.
So TechHire communities are going to help employers link up and find and hire folks based on their actual skills and not just their résumés. (Applause.) Because it turns out, it doesn’t matter where you learned code, it just matters how good you are in writing code. If you can do the job, you should get the job. (Applause.)
And while four-year degrees in engineering and computer science are still important, we have the opportunity to promote programs that we call, for example, coding boot camp -- or online courses that have pioneered new ways to teach tech skills in a fraction of the time and the costs. And these new models have the potential to reach underserved communities, to reach women, who are still underrepresented in this factor; and minorities, who are still underrepresented in this sector; and veterans, who we know can do the job; and lower-income workers, who might have the aptitude for tech jobs but they don’t know that these jobs are within reach.
Understand, within the tech sector, there are going to be tiers of jobs, all of which are tech but they’re not all the same. There’s still going to be the place -- we still have to produce more engineers and advanced degrees in computer science at the upper tier, but there’s all kinds of stuff that’s being done within companies at different sectors that can create great careers for a long of people.
And so what TechHire is going to do is to help local leaders connect the job openings to the training programs to the jobs. And if you’re not already involved in this, you’ve got to get involved, because your community needs this just like everybody else does. So that’s the first component.
The second thing we’re doing -- we’ve got private-sector leaders who are supporting everything from scholarships to job-matching tools. So companies like LinkedIn are going to use data to help identify the skills that employers need. Companies like Capital One are going to help recruit, train and employ more new tech workers -- not out of charity, but because it’s a smart business decision. All of this is going to help us to match the job to the work. And the private sector will be involved in this out of self-interest, but it means that you, the leaders at the local level, are going to have to help create these platforms and facilitate this kind of job match.
Finally, we’re launching a $100 million competition for innovative ideas to train and employ people who are underrepresented in tech. (Applause.) At a time when we all lead digital lives, anybody who has the drive and the will to get into this field should have a way to do so, a pathway to do so.
So my administration is committed to this initiative. We’ve got a lot of private and non-profit sectors leading the way. We want to get more onboard. But ultimately, success is going to rest on folks like you -- on mayors, councilmembers, local leaders -- because you’ve got the power to bring your communities together and seize this incredible economic development opportunity that could change the way we think about training and hiring the workers of tomorrow. And the good news is these workers may emerge from the unlikeliest places.
So let me wrap up with just the example of one person, a woman named LaShana Lewis. Where’s LaShana? She’s here today. I hear she was here. There she is over there. There’s LaShana. (Applause.)
Now, the reason LaShana’s story is so relevant is LaShana grew up in East St. Louis. She had a passion for computers. But because of circumstances, constraints, she wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She wasn’t able to get a college degree, and because she didn’t have a college degree, she couldn’t even get an interview for a tech job, despite her coding skills. So she was working as a bus driver, and she was working in entry-level jobs.
But LaShana apparently is a stubborn person -- (laughter) -- which is good. Sometimes you need to be stubborn. (Applause.) So she refused to give up on her dream, and she used her free time to teach herself new computer skills. And she started going to a coding “meetup” that was run by LaunchCode, which is a non-for-profit that finds talented people across St. Louis and gives them the training and credibility for the tech jobs employers are desperately needing to fill as we speak. So LaShana had the skills. LaunchCode went to bat for her. And today, she’s a systems engineer at MasterCard. (Applause.)
Now, LaShana -- it’s a great story, but understand this -- MasterCard wants to hire more folks like LaShana. Moreover, 40 percent of LaunchCode’s first class came in unemployed. Ninety percent of its graduates were hired full time, with an average starting salary of $50,000 a year. (Applause.)
So that’s what’s already happening, but it’s happening at a small scale. And what we need to do is expand it. And in each of your communities, there is an opportunity to find talent like LaShana, help them get credentialed, help them focus the skills they’ve already got, work with non-for-profits, work with businesses, match them up. Next thing you know, you’ve got a systems engineer, they’ve got a good job. Companies are excited, they’re able to expand. Your tax base is improving. You can reach out and train even more folks. You get on a virtuous cycle of change.
And it doesn’t require huge amounts of money. It requires some planning and organization, and coordination in the federal government is going to be your partner in this process.
So we’ve got to create more stories like LaShana’s. (Applause.) And if we do, then we are going to more effectively capture what is the boundless energy and talent of Americans who have the will, but sometimes need a little help clearing out the way. Help them get on a path to fill the new jobs of this new century.
And that’s what middle-class economics looks like. I said this weekend that Americans don’t believe in anybody getting a free ride, and Americans don’t believe in equality of outcomes. We understand that we’ve got to work hard in this country. You don’t just sit around waiting for something to happen, you’ve got to go get it. (Applause.)
But we do believe in equal opportunity. We do believe in expanding opportunity to everybody who’s willing to work hard. We do believe that, in this country, no matter what you look like or where you come from, how you started out, if you’re willing to put in some blood and sweat and tears, you should be able to make it, and get a decent job, and get a decent wage, and send your kids to college, and retire with dignity and respect, and have health care you can count on, and have a safe community. (Applause.)
We do believe that. And that’s what I’m committed to doing these last two years. And I’m going to need the League of Cities to help me do it -- work with you to build an economy where everybody shares in America’s prosperity, and everybody is contributing to America’s prosperity. (Applause.)
Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. (Applause.)
Student protesters at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Credit Nick Oxford for The New York Times
A University of Oklahoma Fraternity’s Chant and the Rigidity of Racism
Charles M. Blow MARCH 11, 2015
This week, when video was posted showing members of the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon gleefully engaged in a racist chant on a bus, some people were shocked. Others, like me, were not.
This was just video confirmation of a racism that envelops us like a fog, often just as evanescent and immeasurable.
Some people seemed surprised because these were millennials, and college students to boot. Both because of generational easing and educational enlightenment, weren’t these sorts of things supposed to be vestiges of the past?
After all, as the Pew Research Center put it last year, “Millennials are the most racially diverse generation in American history,” with “some 43 percent of millennial adults” being nonwhite.
A 2010 Pew report [ http://www.pewresearch.org/2010/02/01/almost-all-millennials-accept-interracial-dating-and-marriage/ ] found that “almost all millennials accept interracial dating and marriage.” An MTV poll of millennials found that “84 percent say their family taught them that everyone should be treated the same, no matter what their race,” and that 89 percent “do believe that everyone should be treated the same no matter their race.”
But these numbers can be deceiving. They don’t herald an age of egalitarianism as we might think.
The magazine reported the findings of Spencer Piston, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University who found that “younger (under-30) whites are just as likely as older ones to view whites as more intelligent and harder-working than African-Americans.”
Furthermore, the magazine printed this exchange:
“ ‘White millennials appear to be no less prejudiced than the rest of the white population,’ Piston told Science of Us in an email, ‘at least using this dataset and this measure of prejudice.’ ”
In the same vein, as data from the Race Implicit Association Test published in the January/February issue of Mother Jones magazine [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice ] showed, pro-white biases were also strongest among people 65 years old and older, although people 18 to 24 ranked second among the age groups.
It is in this environment of dualities that today’s young people exist, dealing with the growing pains of increasing diversification grinding against unyielding racial attitudes.
And we must acknowledge that the most deleterious effect of racism they face isn’t about hurt feelings or exercises of poor, outdated social graces, but rather about the actual material effects of racism as it suffuses society and becomes embedded in our systems.
Real psychophysical injuries can result from confrontations with overt or even subtle racism. There is a real and worthy conversation taking place in this country now, particularly among young people, around the idea of microaggressions [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RfwnibEd3A (next below)]
— slight, often unintended discriminatory comments or behaviors.
This says nothing of the bias that can — consciously or unconsciously — influence our policies and procedures in all areas of our lives, including education, policing, the criminal justice system and employment.
Here is where it’s important to recognize how much of an influence the fraternity systems have in these areas.
“Fraternity men make up 85 percent of U.S. Supreme Court justices since 1910, 63 percent of all U.S. presidential cabinet members since 1900 and, historically, 76 percent of U.S. senators [and] 85 percent of Fortune 500 executives.”
If this trend continues — and there is no indication that it won’t — the boys on that bus and others like them will be tomorrow’s leaders, and the attitudes they carry with them out of school and into the wider world will have a real impact on real people’s lives.
(In full disclosure, I pledged a fraternity in college and wrote about that experience in my memoir, including how the noble missions of national organizations can be utterly overshadowed by the destructive, renegade rituals of local chapters.)
This is why the vileness displayed on that bus matters: It was a reflection of the distance that must still be covered, and the rigidity of racism and the casualness of hate. It can wear a smile and be set to a tune.
We have to understand what that hate is. Hate is never about the object of the hate but about what is happening in the mind of the hater. It is in the darkness of that space that fear and ignorance merge and morph. It comes out in an impulse to mark and name, to deny and diminish, to exclude and threaten, to elevate the self by putting down the other.
What happened on that bus was bigger than just that bus; it was a reflection of where we are.
Here's What's Wrong With the OU Frat Boys' Apologies
Brett Deering via Getty Images
By Briallen Hopper Lecturer in the Yale English department and Faculty Fellow at the University Church in Yale Posted: 03/13/2015 1:11 pm EDT Updated: 03/13/2015 2:59 pm EDT
"While it may be difficult for those who only know Levi from the video to understand, we know his heart, and he is not a racist." This is how Brody and Susan Pettit, parents of one of the expelled Oklahoma University SAE fraternity brothers, chose to introduce their apology [ http://www.friendsandfamilyoflevipettit.com/ ] on behalf of their son.
According to Levi Pettit's parents, shouting gleefully about upholding racial segregation and lynching n*****s is completely compatible with not being a racist, because when it comes to racism what really matters is your heart.
Meanwhile, Parker Rice, the other expelled student, quickly followed his brief initial statement [ http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2015/03/jesuit-dallas-president-says-graduate-appears-to-be-leading-racist-chant-in-ou-sae-video.html/ ] that he is "deeply sorry for what I did" by talking about how sad it is that his family has been the victim of threats and "frightening talk on social media." He subsequently proceeded to express his concern for his "fraternity friends," who "feel unsafe" and have been subject to harassment. "Hopefully, the university will protect them," he concluded.
Rice seems shockingly oblivious of the fact that the primary victims of threats and "frightening talk on social media" in this story are not his family, but the students whom he and his brothers cheerfully sang about killing. Nor does he seem to realize that his "fraternity friends" might have made African American students on campus feel unsafe and in need of university protection.
A situation like this calls for a real apology, but these young men have failed to deliver it. Instead of acknowledging their own racism, they denied it or sidestepped it. Instead of reckoning honestly with the harm they have done to others, they framed their family and friends as the real victims. Both of these troubling and inadequate "apologies" were written to emphasize the essential goodness and/or victimhood of the white people involved.
Of course, non-apologies are nothing new. We read them every day -- every time there is a PR disaster to handle or a lawsuit to avert. They are a quintessential American genre, from Richard Nixon to The Good Wife. So why do these particular non-apologies matter?
I think they matter for two reasons. First, these statements demonstrate the deep problems with the common American definition of racism. Apparently there is absolutely nothing white Americans can do or say these days that will cause them or their families to admit they are racist. Not using the N word. Not talking about killing black people. Not actually killing black people (to my knowledge, not a single one of the many white men who have shot unarmed black people in the past year have admitted that race was a factor). Nothing.
You might well ask: with non-racists like these, who needs racists? Racism seems to get along just fine without them.
Because the truth is that racism is not a feeling in your heart. It is a system of injustice that can be seen in statistics and buried in bullet wounds and chanted on buses. And it is often perpetrated and perpetuated by people who are "loving and inclusive" and who are "surrounded by a diverse, close-knit group of friends," as Levi Pettit's parents say he is. Sometimes racism goes viral, but most racism can't be caught on camera: it exists in laws, customs, friendship dynamics, and neural pathways, and in places where the N word is never heard.
Second, these statements show how incredibly quick white Americans are to portray themselves as the victims of their own racism against black people. Throughout American history, every instance of the oppression of African Americans has been spun into a myth about the oppression of white people, from poor masters being pressured to free their slaves without adequate compensation, to poor white children being forced to go to school with supposedly backward black children, to poor frat boys being harassed and threatened and made to feel unsafe just because they made a "mistake."
These racial reversals drag white people ever deeper into delusions and resentment, preventing them from seeing the injustice that is right before their eyes. This pernicious tendency to flip the script is one of the biggest obstacles to racial justice in our time. Parker Rice is definitely not the only person to respond to this incident by feeling sorry for the white fraternity boys and minimizing the deep damage they have done to their campus community. And that's a problem.
Let me be clear. I don't believe that the bad things you do when you are 18 or 20 (or 40 or 60) should define you for your entire life. Whether you are a frat boy or a felon, you deserve another chance. You should be given the opportunity to prove that you can recognize the wrong you have done and try to change and make amends. But in order for that to happen, you need to make a real apology.
For Levi Pettit and Parker Rice, just like for me and the rest of white America, the journey to justice begins with acknowledging our own complicity in racism, and being honest about the fact that we are not the victim: we may even be the oppressor. Only then can we help to build the kind of community that Oklahoma University president David Boren so eloquently describes [ http://www.oudaily.com/news/president-david-boren-releases-full-statement-on-sigma-alpha-epsilon/article_02b02ee2-c667-11e4-903d-4fdd71bf61d2.html ]: a place of equal opportunity where people treat each other with respect, love each other like family, and have absolutely zero tolerance for racism.
UMD Frat Brother Allegedly Sent Racist Email, Signed Off With 'F*** Consent' 03/13/2015 Updated: 03/14/2015 [...] [the email's text, censored:] "Regardless of the rush shirt let's get rachet as f*** during rush week. My d**k will be sucked and f***ed in compound basement whether you guys like it or not. Don't invite any n****r gals or curry monsters or slanted eye chinks, unless they're hot. Ziggy you're [sic] girl can come she's cool. Remember my n***as, erect, assert, and insert, and above all else, f*** consent ... d**ks untouched." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/13/umd-racist-frat-email_n_6863386.html [with comments]
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How do you Identify Racism? The Angry Eye with Jane Elliott
Tim Wise’s *THREE* KEY POINTS FOR EFFECTIVE RACIAL DIALOGUE:
Interviewer: “How do we approach conversations about race?”
#1: Racism and racial discrimination continues to put people of color at a significant disadvantage.
It’s THE…important starting point for any HONEST dialogue.
We have to understand the way things actual are, rather than the way we’d like them to be.
Historically and still today…the evidence is overwhelming…A huge nationwide study of 10s of 1000s of companies estimates conservatively that 1/3rd of the time, when people of color are out on a job search, they are the victims of discrimination. That effects about a million to 1.2 million people of color a year. That’s not a minor consideration.
So, if we’re gonna to have a talking about housing, or employment, or education, or wealth, or the criminal justice system, we have to start with the reality that the disparities are real, and that in part, they are significantly caused by racial discrimination — that’s the starting point.
…The biggest problem that we have to get over is “white denial,” though, and I say that as someone who has studied that for a long time. Even in the early 60s, BEFORE the Civil Rights Act was passed, Gallup Polls found that 2 out of 3 white Americans thought that black Americans had FULLY equal opportunity.
Now, obviously, that’s absurd, but that’s what otherwise descent, sane, intelligent people thought even then. So…the hurdle for a lot of white Americans, and even some folks of color, is THERE. But the evidence is the evidence. I encourage people that are skeptical to look at the data…the footnotes, look at the data and decide for themselves.
#2: Being color-blind, or “color mute” is not an option.
Julian Bond, civil rights legend, really says it best, “To be blind to color is to be blind to the consequences of color,” (i.e., racism).
Let me give you an example:
If I’m a teacher right now in the state of Arizona, and I’ve got a lot of Latino kids, I can’t be “colorblind” or blind to the role that their identity plays in their life, because there are right now in the eyes of some, not all…under suspicion as if they shouldn’t even be there, as they don’t belong. If I’m a teacher, and I’m gonna meet the needs of those kids, I’ve got to know where they are. I can’t have this idealized version of life that says, “race doesn’t matter to them,” because IT DOES.
As a parent (I have two kids), if you don’t TALK to children ABOUT RACISM, both PAST AND PRESENT, they grow up — they can look around and see the disparities — they can see that who has what is often about color, who lives where is often about color — if you don’t provide the context for that, you know what happens, those kids grow up, according to the research, to believe that those disparities are A) natural, which is a dangerous thought, or B) that the folks on the bottom are there because…they don’t try hard enough, their bad people, they aren’t as smart as the rest of us.
So, really, “color blindness” or being “color mute” can actually feed racist perceptions.
#3: We all have a stake in combatting racism and racial inequality. That is, people of colors’ progress HELPS white people.
“This is critical, especially for getting over that problem of [white] denial…a lot of times we…worry that…if people of color make progress it’s gonna hurt white folks.
The fact is…racial inequity is DANGEROUS for all of us. In about 30/35/40 years…about half the [U.S.]population will be people of color, the other half will be white people. There is NO WAY that we can maintain a healthy, productive economy and society if one half of society has double the unemployment rate, three times the poverty rate of the other half, 1/10th the wealth, 8 years less life expectancy, double the infant mortality of the other half…we [MUST] worry about the racial disparity of the other half, and the racism that is, in part, responsible for them…because otherwise the whole society is not going to functional because of the racial inequity of the other half.”
State Rep. Gene Alday, a Republican, told The Clarion-Ledger he was against increased funding for education, in particular funding to improve literacy. During his explanation, Alday said he comes "from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks [ http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2015/02/14/miss-third-grade-gate-fear-failure/23443737/ ].' They don't work."
Alday also told the newspaper about a time he visited an emergency room.
“I liked to died. I laid in there for hours because they (black people) were in there being treated for gunshots," Alday was quoted as saying.
Alday didn't deny the comments attributed to him. However, he said he was not a racist.
Alday also said he had no problem with African-Americans.
"Yes, it's true that most of the blacks in my hometown are on welfare," Alday told the newspaper. "But they're good people. I don't have anything against anybody. I'm a straight-up guy. In my little town they had little civil rights walks and I was with them. I'm with everybody."
State Republicans are distancing themselves from Alday.
“I condemn the comments recently made by Rep. Gene Alday,” House Speaker Philip Gunn told AP. "They do not reflect the views of the Republican Party, nor of the leadership of the House of Representatives.”
Who Gets Food Stamps? White People, Mostly Maggie Barcellano prepares dinner at her father's house in Austin, Texas, on Saturday, Jan. 25, 2014. Barcellano, who lives with her father, enrolled in the food stamps program to help save up for paramedic training while she works as a home health aide and raises her three-year-old daughter. 02/28/2015 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/28/food-stamp-demographics_n_6771938.html
Nearly Half Of Low-Income Kids Don't Eat Breakfast. Here's 1 Way To Fix That WASHINGTON, DC - MAR 14: Second graders Jaylon Holbrook and Kimberly Perez eat breakfast in their homeroom class at Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, DC, March 14, 2014. The national school breakfast program provides free breakfast to kids in need but at Bancroft where at least 40% of the students qualify for free breakfast, every student receives breakfast. In the last five years, DC leads the nation in terms of growth in participation in this program. 02/16/2015 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/16/free-breakfast-schools_n_6679430.html
By Andrew Rosenthal, Editorial Page Editor January 3, 2012 5:36 pm
DES MOINES — Talking about race in American politics is uncomfortable and awkward. But it has to be said: There has been a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years, and in this dawning presidential campaign.
You can detect this undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not an African-American. Some earlier examples include: Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “you lie” at one of Mr. Obama’s first appearances before Congress, and House Speaker John Boehner rejecting Mr. Obama’s request to speak to a joint session of Congress—the first such denial in the history of our republic.
More recently, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, in a conversation overheard at Reagan National Airport in Washington, said of Michelle Obama: “She lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” He offered a lame apology, but as Mary C. Curtis put it [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/michelle-obamas-backside-is-your-business-how/2012/01/01/gIQAv0S8UP_blog.html ] on the Washington Post’s new blog She the People: “Can you imagine how the incident would play out if an African American congressman made a crude remark about First Lady Laura Bush’s body? It certainly would have taken more than an insincere apology to wash that sin away.”
This ugly strain was crudely evident in the “birthers” and their ridiculous demands that Mr. Obama produce his birth certificate to prove that he was American, and not secretly an African Muslim.
Just the other day here in Iowa, Mitt Romney’s son, Matt, said his father might release his tax returns “as soon as President Obama releases his grades and birth certificate and sort of a long list of things.” The younger Mr. Romney later backtracked, either because he was sincerely chagrined, or, perhaps more likely, because he recognized that it could hurt his father.
Sometimes the racism is more oblique. Newt Gingrich was prattling on the other day about giving “poor children” in “housing projects” jobs cleaning toilets in public schools to teach them there is an alternative to becoming a pimp or a drug dealer. These children, he said, have no work ethic. If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t get that poor kids in housing projects is code for minorities, he or she hasn’t been paying attention to American politics for the last 50 years. Mr. Gingrich is also fond of calling Mr. Obama “the greatest food stamp President in American history.”
Is Mr. Romney playing the same chords when he talks about how Mr. Obama wants to create an “entitlement society”? The president has said nothing of the sort, and the accusation seems of a piece with the old Republican saw that blacks collect the greatest share of welfare dollars.
Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 was a triumph of American democracy and tolerance. He overcame incredible odds to become the first president of mixed race, the first brown-skinned president. It’s pathetic that some Republicans are choosing to toss that milestone into the garbage in their blind drive to destroy Mr. Obama’s presidency.
Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani is encountering much backlash concerning his comments about the President’s lack of patriotism. One of his former staffers, Mike Paul, strongly disagrees with Giuliani’s statement, and shares his concerns on Hardball.
Giuliani under fire after questioning Obama's 'love of country' Rudy Giuliani questioned President Obama's patriotism last week and hasn't backed down. Meanwhile, Republicans haven't stood up against Giuliani on the issue. Eugene Robinson and Matt Schlap discuss. 2/23/15 http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/giuliani-questions-obamas-love-of-country-403229763586
A deeper examination of the sheer joy of Oklahoma students chanting about hanging n*gg*rs from trees
attribution: SAE Screenshot
by Shaun King Mon Mar 09, 2015 at 10:49 AM PDT
Money, during a bad economy, doesn't actually disappear, it just moves around into different hands and different accounts. If a whole segment of America all of a sudden doesn't have money because of shifts in the economy, it just means that it has shifted to another group, but please understand—that money still exists—just not in your wallet.
Racism is like money. It changes hands. It shape-shifts and finds itself a new carrier, a new account, a new way to express itself in changing times, but it never actually disappears. Suppressed racism is no less real than money in a savings account, but rest assured, suppressed racism always has a way of telling on itself—sometimes in the most despicable, hurtful, and shocking ways.
Before I dig into why a group of white University of Oklahoma college students from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, clad in tuxedos and ball gowns, so giddily chanted about "hanging n*gg*rs from trees" let me clear—racism is dangerous. It's not funny. It's not just words. It's not kids being kids. It's not playful. This is shit is real and it's dangerous.
Racism is the fundamental dehumanization of an entire ethnic group. This dehumanization has consequences. When college students on a bus chant about not letting n*gg*rs into their fraternity, but instead "hanging them from trees" it not only reveals the heart of those singing it, it gives us a real clue into how easy and even joyful it is for them to imagine lynching. If we choose to ignore the clues that people give us about how they feel about our humanity, we bear at least some of the weight of the consequences.
Let's start from the beginning. No, not the beginning of racism, but let's make sure we are all on the same page with what has happened at the University of Oklahoma.
This weekend, this video was released showing students, both men and women, excitedly chanting this:
“There will never be a n*gg*r in SAE. There will never be a n*gg*r in SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me There will never be a n*gg*r in SAE.”
Here's the same chant, but filmed from a different angle [ https://instagram.com/p/z_ilNau41L/ ]. Notice the young man in the tux telling the person filming it to stop at the end. Notice the excitement? The joy? The fun of it all? Surely you don't believe they came up with that chant right then on the spot do you?
For SAE context a few buddies of mine told me their favorite song to sing went-
"There will never be a n*gg*r SAE, there will never be a n*gg*r SAE, Abe set 'em free but they'll never pledge with me, there will never be a n*gg*r SAE."
So, what we are talking about here is not some isolated, freestyle racism made up on the go by a group of hateful Mississippi rednecks. This chant has real roots in this fraternity. These are college students, in tuxedos, on their way to corporate America, declaring not only the racial segregation of their fraternity, but their outright hatred for African Americans.
Giddy happiness, by whites, at black pain and misery isn't a new thing. It's old, very old. Seeing these young people, with such fun fervor, talk about "lynching n*gg*rs from trees" has roots. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find lynching photos of African Americans without smiling white faces.
This wasn't painful for whites, it was a damn celebration. Bring the kids, bring your girlfriend, smell the death in the air, strike a pose, and take a photo of this joyous occasion. If you can stand it, you will find an overwhelmingly happy face in every one of the following photos below.
Why are they smiling? What's making this moment so special for them? I propose to you that what made the same men and women in these photos below so damn happy is the same spirit that makes college students chanting about doing it feel so great about life.
For a moment, in the most carnal way possible, the deep misery of another reminds them of just how privileged they are—and it feels good.
"My characterization of ISIS is that they have 14th century ethics and 21st century weapons," he said.
King and others who have reached into the Middle Ages for an apt Islamic State comparison may be going back further than they need to. The 19th and 20th centuries work just as well.
For David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, the actions of ISIS and other extremist groups are familiar -- no better, no worse than the historic stateside violence against African-Americans.
"There's nothing you're going to see today that's not going to have already occurred in the U.S.," he said. "If you think of these groups that behead now -- first of all, beheading is barbaric but it's no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings that occurred in the U.S."
The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic terror organization from its beginning, said Pilgrim, who finds it offensive when, after 9/11, some Americans would bemoan that terrorism had finally breached U.S. borders.
"That is ignoring and trivializing -- if not just summarily dismissing -- all the people, especially the peoples of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had their homes bombed in this country; who were victims of race riots," he said.
Lynchings like Donald's exemplify the terrorist methods that have always been the "stock and trade" of the KKK, according to Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"Michael Donald was sort of a classic case," he said. "It was real terrorism in the sense that Michael Donald was a completely random victim. He was completely unknown to his Klan murderers. He was simply abducted off the street and murdered in order to frighten black people."
The study found almost 3,960 African-Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950 -- a number that supersedes previous estimates by at least 700. It looked at lynchings in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
* * *
An "Instant Nigger" is 50 percent tar, 45 percent ignorance and 5 percent water, according to a flier thrown on the campus of Murphy High School in Mobile by Klansmen in the early 1970s.
"I'll never forget it," said Ada Fields, a black Mobile resident who attended the school. "It was a paper with a jar and a black body -- totally black -- with big bug eyes looking out the jar."
Alabama has a peculiar history with racially motivated terrorism -- arguably more so than other states in the Deep South -- and the state's Klan history complicates things a bit more. Since each cell of the Ku Klux Klan has a different history, Potok said, it is difficult to discuss the Klan as a single, monolithic group.
There were four eras of the Klan -- and the first and third eras were, arguably, the most characteristic of a terrorist organization.
Initial incarnations of the Klan used [ http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2934 ] intimidation and violence to oppose the extension of civil liberties to blacks, maintain authority over black laborers and enforce their beliefs of white supremacy during Reconstruction, the years after the Civil War when the North occupied the South and briefly attempted to introduce more equitable practices.
Third-era Klan groups arose in response to the Brown v. Board of Education verdict, with membership peaking at about 40,000 around 1965. These individual Klans were more autonomous and often used the same terrorist methods as the first incarnation in an attempt to impede the civil rights movement.
Henry Hays and James Knowles, Donald's murderers, belonged to the United Klans of America, a third-era KKK organization based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that, at its height, was considered the strongest and most violent in the nation.
"The United Klans of America absolutely gloried in violence. That was their main, and perhaps their only, political tool," Potok said. "Violence and terrorism was a way of life for the United Klans of America. The group thought that these tactics would make it possible to reinstitute white supremacy."
Not only was the UKA linked to Donald's killing, members were also held responsible for the Mother's Day attack on Freedom Riders and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing -- an attack resulting in the deaths of four young black girls. Both attacks occurred around Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961 and 1963, respectively.
"It's like they were born to have a genocide or something -- a black genocide," Fields said of the Klan. "They hated blacks. They was gonna get 'em anyway. You couldn't walk the street. If they could get you, they would hurt you."
However, Donald's lynching wasn't part of a widespread attempt to make a statement against a large civil rights movement -- it was revenge for a particular incident. He was, as Potok said, a random sacrifice -- the KKK's retribution for the death of a local white police officer whose alleged killer, an African-American, had walked free.
A Klan leader calling for the death of a black person was a retro concept in 1981 -- one more aligned with the group's ideology during the civil rights movement.
"If you go back to the '60s, the Klan often planned murders and bombings and so on -- literally in rooms full of men," Potok said of the outdated practice. "Now, it was true in the Michael Donald case in the sense that the leader, Hays, essentially organized the killing."
Hays, the leader's son, and Knowles took the Titan's message to heart. On March 21, 1981, they hopped into their car [ http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-lynching11.html ] and drove around Mobile with plans to avenge the death of the white police officer.
Eventually, Hays and Knowles spotted Donald as he walked home from buying a pack of cigarettes. After asking him for directions, Hays and Knowles forced Donald into their car at gunpoint and drove to a neighboring county.
His body was left hanging to be discovered the next morning in a black area of Mobile, according to Fields.
"It really touched home when they come and hanged a dead body -- a black, young man's dead body -- in a black area. It just really bothered us because they hung him right in our neighborhood," Fields said. "It took a lot out of us."
Hays received the death penalty and was executed on June 6, 1997.
* * *
On June 7, 1998, three white men kidnapped African-American James Byrd [ http://www.khou.com/story/news/2014/07/17/11531380/ ], chained him to the back of a pickup truck by his ankles and dragged him almost 4 miles down a road near Jasper, Texas. Byrd died via decapitation after hitting a culvert, though the autopsy report said he was likely conscious [ http://www.texasobserver.org/long-road-out-of-jasper/ ] for the majority of the ordeal.
Prosecutors, according to CNN [ http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/21/justice/texas-dragging-death-execution/ ], said the attack was "one of the most vicious hate crimes in U.S. history" and was intended to advertise a new white supremacist organization. In 2009, President Barack Obama expanded [ http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/28/hate.crimes/ ] hate crime legislation due to the deaths of Byrd and Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was kidnapped and beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998.
Pilgrim of the Jim Crow Museum, however, said Byrd's death was more than a hate crime -- it was a lynching.
A lynching, per Pilgrim, involves an extrajudicial killing where the death is used to make a statement against a certain group or individual. Essentially, the killing has a purpose that transcends the actual death of the victim regardless of whether it was executed publicly -- a common misconception as to what defines a lynching.
Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said such crimes are often used as a warning.
"It's not just that you're killing this person, for one reason or another. It's that you're warning all the rest," Potok said. "It was message crime. It was supposed to send a message to black people in Alabama, and elsewhere, that if you do things like set black cop killers free, we will kill you."
While current terror organizations abroad are fighting to upset the existing conditions of their societies, the Klan aimed to maintain the status quo being threatened by a rapidly growing social movement.
The goal of first- and third-era Klan groups was to return to a time when "men were men, women were women, and black people knew their place," according to Potok.
"The radical right, in general in the United States, was -- until the end of the civil rights movement -- essentially restorationist," he said. "The Klan, and most other groups of those years ... wanted to turn back the clock."
Knowles testified in 1984 during a civil rights lawsuit filed against the Klan by Beulah Mae Donald, Michael Donald's mother, that one of the purposes of the killing was to "show Klan strength in Alabama."
Mobile's black community got the message loud and clear.
"They come out and let us know they in full bloom ... How do you think that made us feel? It was like they can do anything they wanna do," she said. "They sent a message to us saying, 'Y'all think that it's gone away. [That] we've left -- we still here.' Cause we didn't think they'd do something like that."
3 Sentenced In Racist Attack That Killed Black Man
In this June 26, 2011 frame grab from a security video, a pickup truck can barely be seen hitting James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old black man on a Jackson, Miss., street in the top right corner of the frame. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Exclusive: Metro Inn Surveillance Video Shows Attack, Slaying
By JEFF AMY Posted: 02/25/2015 5:39 pm EST Updated: 02/25/2015 9:59 pm EST
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Three more young white men, all part of a group that repeatedly searched Mississippi's capital city for black people to attack, have been sentenced to federal prison.
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves on Wednesday sentenced 25-year-old William Kirk Montgomery to 19 ½ years for his role in the attacks in the spring of 2011 that climaxed with the death of 47-year-old auto plant worker James Craig Anderson. Two other men who were part of earlier outings but not present that night — 22-year-old Joseph Paul Dominick and 23-year-old Jonathan Kyle Gaskamp — got four-year sentences.
The three men, like the seven other defendants in the case, had pleaded guilty earlier.
Anderson's death came on the last of a series of forays to what the group called "Jafrica" — a combination of Jackson and Africa — to assault black people. It ended in a hotel parking lot where the group spotted Anderson, who appeared to be intoxicated. Montgomery and six others were present as John Aaron Rice and Deryl Paul Dedmon beat Anderson. As Dedmon left in his truck, he ran over Anderson, inflicting fatal injuries.
The actions were captured on a hotel surveillance camera, drawing widespread national attention.
The inquiry that followed Anderson's death revealed that the group, including Dominick and Gaskamp had repeatedly driven around, throwing beer bottles and shooting ball bearings from a slingshot. One night, Gaskamp was among those who beat an unidentified man at a golf course. Another night they tried to run someone down.
"Yes, they had done it before and no one died, and the court believes, but for the death of James Craig Anderson, they would have returned to Jafrica again and again," said Reeves, who is black. "They would have continued their mission to harm, their mission to hurt."
All three expressed remorse before sentencing.
"There are no right words for me to be able to say how sorry I am," Dominick said. "There are no words to right the wrongs."
"It was the worst mistake of my life and I can't take it back," Gaskamp said.
Anderson's family members repeated their emotional condemnation of the acts that led to the death.
"I want you to understand what you took from me, what you took from my family," said James Bradfield, Anderson's longtime partner. "There is no sentence that is going to be good enough for you."
Reeves urged the men to make good on their promises of redemption.
"Justice will not be complete unless these defendants — unless you — use the remainder of your lives to learn from this experience and fully commit to making a positive difference in the New Mississippi; that Mississippi which is only two years shy of celebrating its bicentennial," Reeves said. "Prove to your family, your friends and all those who have read about this case that you were worth saving."
Reeves sentenced Dedmon to 50 years and John Aaron Rice to 18 years on Feb. 10. That day, he also sentenced Dylan Wade Butler to seven years. Dedmon is also concurrently serving two life sentences in state prison after pleading guilty in a Mississippi court in 2012 to capital murder and hate crime.
In this nation, we have been ingrained with the notion that ordinary everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people have genuine representative government because we have the right to vote. Yet, elected officials have repeatedly simply lied to the electorate, and once they have been voted into office, proceeded to violate the trust of those who voted for them. Unfortunately, this is not a new or even an unusual phenomenon. - See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/author/larry-pinkney http://www.blackactivistwg.org/
The Obama Deception is a hard-hitting film that completely destroys the myth that Barack Obama is working for the best interests of the American people.
The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery.
We have reached a critical juncture in the New World Order's plans. It's not about Left or Right: it's about a One World Government. The international banks plan to loot the people of the United States and turn them into slaves on a Global Plantation.
Covered in this film: who Obama works for, what lies he has told, and his real agenda. If you want to know the facts and cut through all the hype, this is the film for you.
Watch the Obama Deception and learn how:
- Obama is continuing the process of transforming America into something that resembles Nazi Germany, with forced National Service, domestic civilian spies, warrantless wiretaps, the destruction of the Second Amendment, FEMA camps and Martial Law.
- Obama's handlers are openly announcing the creation of a new Bank of the World that will dominate every nation on earth through carbon taxes and military force.
- International bankers purposefully engineered the worldwide financial meltdown to bankrupt the nations of the planet and bring in World Government.
- Obama plans to loot the middle class, destroy pensions and federalize the states so that the population is completely dependent on the Central Government.
- The Elite are using Obama to pacify the public so they can usher in the North American Union by stealth, launch a new Cold War and continue the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
From time to time, we give celebrities a chance to read some of the mean things people tweet about them. We extended that same offer to our Commander in Chief, who happily agreed. This is an all President Obama edition of #MeanTweets.
Government measures have proved inadequate, but communities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are coming up with ways to battle the Ebola virus.
By Luke Mogelson January 19, 2015 Issue
An isolation ward in a former classroom in Monrovia. The World Health Organization has documented eight thousand deaths in Liberia and neighboring countries, and the actual toll is almost certainly much higher.
Credit Photograph by John Moore / Getty
Robertsport, the capital of Grand Cape Mount County, in northern Liberia, lies at the remote end of a long peninsula, between Lake Piso and the sea. Even during the dry season, the road that leads to it is punishing. In late July, Omu Fahnbulleh made the trip on the back of a motorcycle, in the rain. She was returning home after burying her younger brother, who had died from a brief, intense illness in another district. Fahnbulleh, who is thirty years old, knew that Ebola had recently spread to parts of Liberia, but, so far, no one from Grand Cape Mount had become infected. When she arrived at the small beachside house she shared with her husband, Abraham, their three children, and Abraham’s family, Fahnbulleh’s body ached and she had a fever; she attributed her condition to the hard journey and to the fact that she was three months pregnant.
Over the next couple of days, her condition worsened, and she asked Abraham to take her to St. Timothy, a rudimentary hospital on a steep hill above their home. There she miscarried. In the morning, a doctor collected a blood sample and put her in isolation. Later, when Abraham visited, he was not allowed to enter the room. After a harrowing week of sharp internal pain and constant vomiting and diarrhea, Fahnbulleh was told that she had tested positive for Ebola. An ambulance van arrived to take her to the country’s capital, Monrovia. By then, Abraham was also sick. They were loaded into the back of the ambulance, on stretchers side by side.
Fahnbulleh and her husband believed that they were going to a hospital. Instead, several hours later, the ambulance turned onto a narrow lane that ran past low-slung shops and shanties. Fahnbulleh realized that they were in West Point, Monrovia’s largest slum. A police officer opened a metal gate, and the ambulance stopped inside a compound enclosed by tall walls. In the middle of the compound stood a schoolhouse. The driver helped Fahnbulleh and Abraham through a door, down a hall, and into a classroom. A smeared chalkboard hung on one of the walls, which were painted dark blue. Dim light filtered through a latticed window. On the concrete floor, ailing people were lying on soiled mattresses. When Fahnbulleh lay down, she saw that the two men beside her were dead.
That night, a man in a biohazard suit appeared. On his back, he wore a rectangular tank, filled with chlorine, connected by tubing to a black wand. He moved deliberately through the room, spraying the floor and walls, the patients, the two dead men. He was about to spray Abraham, but Fahnbulleh told him not to.
The next morning, another suited man brought cornmeal. Neither Fahnbulleh nor her husband could eat. Abraham told her that he felt that he would die; Fahnbulleh decided that they needed to get away from the dead men. She dragged her mattress to the hall and found an empty classroom. When she returned to fetch Abraham, he was lying on the concrete. The man in the suit was spraying him. He told Fahnbulleh that Abraham had fainted while trying to walk.
Fahnbulleh sat beside her husband and waited for him to wake up. She understood that he had wanted to follow her. After a while, she touched his mouth and felt no breath. She touched his chest and felt no heartbeat. She raised his arm, and it was limp. Eventually, she unfolded an extra shawl that she had brought with her from Robertsport and covered his face.
At daybreak, after spending the night in the other classroom, she walked out of the school. Policemen loitered in the yard. When Fahnbulleh reached the gate, they let her pass, afraid to touch her.
Her ankles had grown progressively inflamed since her miscarriage. Every step was painful as she made her way through West Point, past video clubs, fufu shops, and tables of dried fish. She headed to Clara Town, a mile away, where Abraham’s sister lived, but when she arrived her sister-in-law, who had heard that Fahnbulleh was infected, refused to let her in. Unsure where to go, Fahnbulleh found a carpenter’s shop and curled up amid the lumber scraps and tools. The next day, someone discovered her and called an ambulance. This time, she was taken to an Ebola Treatment Unit at a government hospital. After two weeks, she was discharged and went to a safe house in Robertsport to recover for a month before returning home. In her absence, the virus had killed others, including her father, mother, sister, and twelve-year-old daughter, Mariama.
Fahnbulleh told me this story in November, on the porch of her house. Her two remaining children chased mangy chickens through the grass. A breeze moved the palms. Nearby, one of Abraham’s brothers boiled water on a fire. At several points—while explaining how the police officers at the gate of the schoolhouse had been unwilling to stop her, and how she’d walked through West Point with badly swollen ankles—Fahnbulleh grinned, rocked forward, and laughed.
[...]
The epidemic began in December of 2013, in a small village in Guinea
[...]
The W.H.O. did not declare a global emergency and call for a coördinated international response until August, and by then a thousand people had died. In October, the United States allocated seven hundred and fifty million dollars and began deploying soldiers to the region to construct Ebola Treatment Units, or E.T.U.s, set up mobile laboratories, provide logistical support, and train local medical staff. Twenty-eight hundred U.S. troops eventually arrived, following advisers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Americans were joined by hundreds of British military personnel, hundreds of Chinese and Cuban nurses and physicians, and aid workers from international nonprofit organizations. Even so, the epidemic continues. Last month, Doctors Without Borders, which has been in the forefront of treating Ebola patients and sounded the earliest and loudest alarms for aggressive foreign intervention, published an assessment warning that efforts by donor countries “have been sluggish and patchy, falling dangerously short of expectations.”
[...]
Gbessay gestured at the nurses, all of whom were from West Point, and all of whom were volunteers. “It is because of love we are in the field,” he said. “It is because of love they are here, they are working, and have not gotten a dime.” Gbessay peered at me. He wished the outsider to see. “Just because of love.”
[...]
Many politicians had criticized President Obama for deploying troops in West Africa, and Pentagon officials had emphasized that no military doctors or medics would provide treatment.
Westerners head to Iraq to fight as Christian warriors against Islamic State
Brett, who asked that his last name be withheld, a 28-year-old U.S. Army veteran, walks the streets of al-Qosh, Iraq, with a recently formed Christian militia dubbed Dwekh Nawsha. Some members say they came to fight for their religion. Others say they just want to fight against the Islamic State. Ayman Oghanna/The Washington Post
By Loveday Morris The Washington Post Published: March 2, 2015
DOHUK, Iraq — In a smoky living room in a makeshift military headquarters in this northern Iraqi city, Brett, a former U.S serviceman with tattoos of Jesus etched on his forearms, explains how he hopes to help to keep the church bells of Iraq ringing.
"Jesus tells us what you do unto the least of them, you do unto me," said the 28-year-old from Detroit, who served an extended tour in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 and asked for his surname not to be published to protect his family at home. "I couldn't sit back and watch what was happening, women being raped and sold wholesale."
So in December he travelled to northern Iraq, where he joined a growing band of foreigners leaving their lives in the West behind to fight with newly formed Christian militias. The leaders of those militias say they've been swamped with hundreds of requests from veterans and volunteers from around the world who want to join them.
The new arrivals add to a varied array of foreign fighters and donors drawn to the expanding conflict, which has had a brutal impact on Iraq's minority sects and is threatening Christianity here at its roots. But while they say they welcome the gesture, Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq are wondering how to vet foreign recruits who are clamoring to sign up.
Brett's group, Dwekh Nawsha, which means "self-sacrifice" in Aramaic, the ancient language spoken by Jesus, has only six Westerners among its 200 Iraqi Assyrian Christian fighters. But Emanuel Khoshaba Youkhana, the secretary general of the Assyrian Patriotic Party, which funds the group, says more than 900 other foreigners have been in touch to find out how to join.
Some of the newly arrived say they've come to fight for their religion — others just to fight. Brett calls himself the "King of Nineveh" — after the province of ancient Christian villages now occupied by the Islamic State. He lifts his shirt to show a tattoo of St. Michael on his back and the Twenty-Third Psalm, inked up his side.
The Iraqi Assyrians he fights alongside, not all of whom are impressed by the "King of Nineveh" persona, stress that this is not a crusade, but a fight to return to their homes.
"We don't want to fight a holy war for Christians," said Marcus Naissan, 25, an Iraqi Assyrian fighter. "We fight for our land."
He said that while the influx of foreigners brings the media spotlight and potential funding, it also brings concerns.
"We aren't crusaders," he said. "That's how they make it look."
Brett and others say they receive dozens of emails a day from potential recruits.
"This place will be flooded," he said. "From Australia, Asia, literally everywhere. It's overwhelming, it's awesome."
All recruits are interviewed before they come to ensure their intentions are good, he said. Youkhana says checks are carried out, but he wouldn't go into the details.
At the base in Dohuk, Louis, a former Marine from Houston, nervously drums his fingers on his Kalashnikov as he explains that he's desperate get to the front line to fight Islamic State militants.
"I was prepared for this to be a one-way ticket," said the 24-year-old, who was discharged from the service just over a month ago after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, following a six-month tour in Afghanistan in 2012. "I just want to get out there."
He decided to join the group after the Marines said he would not be deployed again because of his diagnosis.
"I couldn't adjust to peacetime," he said. "The fight for me wasn't over. I felt I didn't have a purpose anymore."
While religion wasn't a particular motivation, he said Dwekh Nawsha's fight against the Islamic State was an easy one to relate to.
--- "I was prepared for this to be a one-way ticket. I just want to get out there." ---
Some foreigners have concerns about potential legal entanglements on their return home. The Christian units are on the home turf of the Kurds, and a Kurdish paramilitary group that is battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, called the People's Protection Units, or YPG, is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
Masrour Barzani, Kurdistan's national security chief, said that foreign governments were being kept up to date on those travelling to join military groups.
"There are regulations we have to bear in mind and make sure everything happens according to the legal structure," Barzani said. "We are thankful for any volunteer that is coming here and fight. But we don't lack men, we lack weapons."
Currently waiting for papers to confirm that their status is legal, most of the foreigners with Dwekh Nawsha have yet to see much in the way of combat.
Just two have the right paperwork to travel with their weapons, Youkhana said, leaving the others largely confined to their base in Dohuk.
Other recruits are being held back until paperwork is organized for those who have already arrived.
Tim Locks, a 38-year-old from Britain who ran a construction firm before arriving in Iraq two weeks ago, admits the wait has been frustrating.
"We are just waiting for the Is to be dotted and the Ts to be crossed," he said.
As the Islamic State takes hundreds of Christians hostage across the border in Syria, the leaders here say they are still trying to work out how best to use outside assistance.
"It's very good to have the Westerners coming," said Cpt. Khalid Hamzo, an officer with the official peshmerga forces. He said he recently obtained permission to take two foreigners out to the front lines to see if they could help resolve an issue with a supply of mortars that weren't exploding.
"But they couldn't help without the Internet," he said, as he left the makeshift headquarters with a printout of a manual on 81-mm. mortars. "We need artillery experts."
The Assyrian Christian fighters are largely kept away from the front lines. At Dwekh Nawsha's forward operating base in the Christian village of Baqufa, they make up the second line of defense behind Kurdish peshmerga forces. The battle here is largely static, but mortar fire is exchanged daily.
For the Iraqi Christian fighters here, the battle is more personal.
Roni Najm, 21, can see his village from the telescope positioned on the building's roof. Islamic State's black flag flutters above its church. "It just makes you cry," he said
At Least 100 Westerners Join The Kurdish Fight Against Islamic State
Posted on March 6, 2015 by KDN
British citizen Konstandinos Erik Scurfield (foreground) with Kurdish fighters and foreign volunteers in Iraq
By Christopher Harress – International Business Times
A former British marine became the second Westerner killed while fighting for Kurdish forces against the Islamic State group. Konstandinos Erik Scurfield, 25, was killed while fighting in an area west of the Syrian city of Qamishli earlier this week. He was one of around 100 Westerners fighting alongside the 30,000-strong Kurdish peshmerga forces, according to the BBC.
While governments and media have made much of Westerners joining the Islamic State group, Scurfield’s death highlights a similar situation on the other side: Former soldiers and even ordinary citizens from Western nations are travelling to fight against the extremist group, also known as ISIS, in Syria and Iraq.
The Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) said that Scurfield made the journey in December after finishing service with the Royal Marines in the United Kingdom, according to the group’s Facebook page.
“He was martyred during a bloody battle with ISIS forces in an attempt to liberate the village of Xezale near Til Berak in the Rojava enclave (western Kurdistan),” said a YPG spokesperson on the Facebook page, which had 66,000 likes as of March 5.
His death comes just one week after the death of Australian Ashley Johnston, also known by the Kurdish name Heval Bagok Serhed, who was killed while fighting the Islamic State on behalf of YPG.
Both men were part of a foreign fighter group known as the “Lions of Rojava,” which according to its Facebook page aims to send “terrorists to hell and save humanity.”
While the full details of those 100 Western fighters are not fully known, media reports indicate that they are from Australia, Great Britain, the U.S. Germany, Spain, France, Canada, Israel and the Netherlands. Among them are a 17 year-old from London, a biker gang from Germany and former U.S. military personnel.
Jason Matson, a former U.S. Army soldier fighting in the Lions of Rojava (Rojava is a region of Kurdistangroup, said he was drawn to the fight by a sense of duty towards the Kurds because of their loyalty to the U.S. during the Iraq war. “I’m not going back until the fight is finished and ISIS is crippled,” Matson said to the Associated Press in early February. “I decided that if my government wasn’t going to do anything to help this country, especially Kurdish people who stood by us for 10 years and helped us out while we were in this country, then I was going to do something.”
Matson, three other Americans and an Australian said they joined the group after contacting them through Facebook.
Westerners with past military experience are highly sought by Kurdish forces, as they can train the many Kurdish fighters who have little or no experience, and are often as young as 17, said Western ex-soldiers cited by the AP. With no body armor and just the weapons they take from dead Islamic State fighters, the young soldiers are taught the basics of how to act in battle.
Some of those Western volunteers are breaking the law to go fight with the Kurds. Not all countries allow their citizens to fight for other nations, or militia groups.
The U.S. State Department considers the Turkey-based Kurdish Workers Party, also known as the PKK, a terrorist organization, but the U.S. government has not banned Americans from fighting alongside militia groups that are linked to it. According to U.S. law, Americans can fight for other countries and groups as long as those groups are not fighting against the U.S.
Australia, on the other hand, has specific rules against citizens fighting with any group outside of the Australian military. It also was the first country to criminalize travel to Syria’s al-Raqqa province, the de facto capital of the s-called Islamic State.
The rules used to stop people from joining the Islamic State group have not been applied equally to those travelling to join Kurdish fighters. BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said that if any British person was suspected of trying to join ISIS, they would get their “collar felt at Heathrow,” London’s main international airport, and yet there “seems to be a silence about people going to fight on the other side.”
But the notion of fighting in other people’s wars is not unique to the conflict unfolding in the Middle East. Just one week ago, Spanish authorities arrested eight people who, the government said, had been fighting for pro-Russian rebels in East Ukraine. The police used information gathered from social media to make the arrests.
The scientist and bestselling writer has become the face of a new crusading atheism. But even his closest allies worry that his online provocations do more harm than good
Richard Dawkins at home in Oxford. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Sophie Elmhirst Tuesday 9 June 2015 01.00 EDT
.. love him or loath him, or a bit of mix 'n match, there is plenty about the man in this one .. F6, the first of two videos
here is also roughly a third down in yours .. this is the second ..
[.. which then was attempted in part in Trump's 2? failed travel ban attempts so far ..]
But as Ken Chitwood reminds us in “A ‘Radical’ Response to Islamophobia .. https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2015/radical-response-islamophobia ,” (Sojourners, August 2015), Christians have an important role in ending anti-Muslim discrimination. Through the liberating power of Christ, writes Chitwood, “[w]e are no longer enslaved to cultural constructions of antipathy such as Islamophobia.”
And given our nation’s troublesome script when it comes to responding to acts of violence carried out by self-identified Muslims, one way Christians can help end Islamophobia is by refusing to join the chorus of voices calling for Muslims to condemn Chattanooga — or any other violent act committed by a Muslim extremist. Here’s why:
1. Asking Muslims to condemn terrorism assumes an inherent link between Islam and violence.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a vocal critic of Islam, writes in her latest book, that “Islamic violence is rooted not in social, economic, or political conditions — or even in theological error — but rather in the foundational texts of Islam itself.” The Qur’an, she insists, is a violent text through and through. It programs Muslims to act violently.
Hirsi Ali operates on an assumption that since there are some violent texts in Islam’s sacred texts, all Muslims are prone to violence. It’s not an assumption she makes about Christianity, though the Bible has its fair share of violent texts. She also has no interest into venturing into the complexity of Quranic interpretation or grappling with the many texts that address peace, justice, and mercy. Nor does she care to explain why the majority of Muslims reject violent extremism, or why most domestic terrorist attacks in the U.S. are carried out by non-Muslims. It’s simply enough for her to state that Islam equals violence. Sadly, too many Americans share Hirsi Ali’s assumptions, hence the tendency to believe Muslims approve of terrorism unless we ask them to state otherwise.
The real question we should ask is why do some Muslims and Christians find inspiration to carry out despicable acts of violence from their scriptures, while many others find inspiration to work for peace and justice from the same scriptures? How can Islamic texts inspire ISIS to behead its enemies and also inspire Malala Yousafzai to fight for girls’ education? How could slaveholders in nineteenth-century America find justification for slavery in the Bible while abolitionists found justification for eliminating slavery from the same book?
Religion is not like the Matrix. Believers don’t “plug in” to their sacred texts and download a program that automatically makes them think and act in a certain way. How we interpret our texts and traditions is shaped by a complex array of cultural, political, and economic factors, not to mention our unique individual experiences. Otherwise, it makes no sense how the same religion can produce a terrorist organization and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
2. Asking Muslims to condemn terrorism ignores the many condemnations Muslims have made against terrorism.
Thomas Friedman, the renowned New York Times columnist, wrote back in 2005, “To this day…no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.” It was a ridiculous claim. His own newspaper published a full-page ad one month after the 9/11 attacks with condemnations from Muslim leaders across the world. But Friedman can get away with such an absurd accusation because the larger public is unaware of these denunciations.
In the Internet age, we cannot plead ignorance to these realities. Evidence of Muslims condemning terrorism is overwhelming. Failure to “see” and accept this evidence is tantamount to promoting an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion toward Muslims. 3. The question masks our own violent past and present.
I know: this is a very unpopular topic. President Obama did his best .. https://sojo.net/articles/echoes-abraham-lincoln-president-obama-s-prayer-breakfast-speech .. at the National Prayer Breakfast in February to address the legacy of violence carried out in the name of Christianity. But the political and media establishment responded with a collective gasp. Some journalists and politicians expressed their disappointment that the president would speak so insensitively about Christianity at a gathering full of Christian clergy and leaders.
A conversation about Western or Christian violence is an uphill battle. That doesn’t mean Obama was wrong to try it. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials and executions – these are the clearest examples of unjust violence justified in part by recourse to the Christian faith. To this list, plenty of other episodes could be added, from the Atlantic slave trade to Hitler’s Germany to the Bosnian genocide.
Closer to our own time, the most egregious example is torture. When the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture was made available to the public in December 2014, some of the most heinous human rights violations from the U.S.-led war on terror came to light. What jumped out to me around the same time was a Washington Post poll .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-poll-finds-majority-of-americans-believe-torture-justified-after-911-attacks/2014/12/16/f6ee1208-847c-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html .. indicating that a majority of white Christians supported CIA-sponsored torture. It’s hard not to believe that there is an element of racism involved in these attitudes given that those tortured were Muslims and Arabs, not white Southern Baptists or Methodists.
Whenever we ask Muslims to condemn terrorism, we divert attention away from our own violent past and present. The question enables us to project our sins of commission and omission onto the Muslim “Other” so that we need not take seriously our own complicity in a violent world order.
It’s time to stop asking Muslims to condemn terrorism; asking this question keeps us in bondage to hostility and fear. But as Chitwood writes .. https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2015/radical-response-islamophobia , the One who liberates us from fearing Muslims is the same One who invites us into fellowship with Muslims. If this is true, then our friendships and not our fears must drive the questions we ask about Muslims in the future.
Todd Green (@toddhgreen) author of The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press, 2015), is Associate Professor of Religion at Luther College.
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